Trump Lawyer Threatens $5 Billion Lawsuit Over Think Tank's National Guard Crime Report

A personal lawyer for President Donald Trump has threatened the Center for American Progress (CAP) with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit unless the liberal think tank retracts a report critical of the administration's National Guard deployments and apologizes to the president.

The letter from attorney Alejandro Brito, described as Trump's personal lawyer, set a deadline of 5 p.m. Friday for CAP to comply. CAP, whose president and CEO is Neera Tanden, called the threat "baseless" (The Independent). The organization was founded in 2003 by John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff.

The report at the center of the dispute was released on July 13. CAP's analysis examined National Guard deployments in Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Los Angeles, concluding that the deployments failed to produce a measurable reduction in crime despite an estimated cost of $1.7 billion. The report found no evidence that the presence of National Guard troops reduced violent crime in any of the cities studied (American Progress.

The deployments themselves began in June 2025, when Trump federalized California's National Guard and sent 2,000 guardsmen and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to protect ICE and other federal personnel. Federalizing means the president took control of a state's National Guard units away from the state's governor and placed them under federal command. On August 11, 2025, Trump federalized Washington, D.C.'s police force and dispatched an initial 800 National Guard troops to the capital while declaring a "crime emergency." At the time, D.C.'s violent crime rate was at a 30-year low.

The administration also authorized deployments to Portland, Oregon; Chicago; Memphis, Tennessee; and New Orleans, while threatening to send troops to Baltimore; New York City; St. Louis; San Francisco; and Oakland, California. Courts blocked active National Guard presence in Chicago and Portland. In a December 2025 social media post, Trump announced the withdrawal of Guard troops from all cities except Memphis, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., by February 2026.

In March 2026, at a public roundtable in Memphis, Trump claimed that the Memphis Safe Task Force, which deployed federal agents and the Tennessee National Guard to the city, had "stopped crime."

CAP's report challenged that assertion with comparative data. Across the 11 cities where deployments were carried out or threatened, the 12-month rolling violent crime rate fell 14 percent and the rolling murder rate fell 22 percent from June 2024 to June 2025. But violent crime and homicides were already declining in American cities throughout 2023 and 2024, before Trump took office, complicating any claim that the deployments caused those reductions.

The legal threat was reported on August 21 by The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Hill, all publishing the same day (The Guardian; The New York Times; The Hill).

The broader context here involves the intersection of defamation law and policy critique. Think of defamation law as a set of rules designed to protect people from false statements that damage their reputation. But when the target is a research report consisting of data analysis and policy assessment rather than a specific false claim about an individual, the legal bar is high. The Supreme Court's standard in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan requires "actual malice" for public officials to recover damages in defamation cases, meaning the publisher either knew the information was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true. A $5 billion demand letter directed at a think tank for publishing empirical findings about a government program raises questions about where criticism of presidential policy crosses into legally actionable territory.

The demand also follows a pattern in which the Trump administration has used legal threats to challenge unfavorable coverage or analysis. Whether CAP retracts the report or allows the deadline to pass will signal whether such threats function as deterrents or as catalysts for broader public attention to the underlying findings.

For now, CAP's public posture is defiant. Whether the letter proceeds to an actual filing is the operative question, and the Friday deadline provides a concrete point at which the standoff resolves or escalates.