President-elect Donald Trump may spend part of the week before Christmas being grilled by lawyers in his defamation case against ABC News.
Lawyers representing the broadcast network and “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos on Friday morning argued in a virtual court hearing that Trump must make himself available for a deposition next week, before a Dec. 24 deadline for the defendants to file a motion for summary judgment to avoid a trial.
Trump has thus far not made himself available for a recorded deposition — to the apparent chagrin of the defense team.
“I can understand your frustration,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisette M. Reid said to Nathan Siegel, the lawyer representing ABC News. She noted that while the president-elect previously had a “fairly good argument” to be unavailable for a deposition during a busy election campaign, “he’s now a completely different posture, and he should be able to make himself available.”
Siegel offered to make the deposition as convenient as possible for the president-elect, telling the judge he would fly down to Florida to interview Trump near his Mar-a-Lago home and limit the proceedings to four hours. He also suggested the possibility of a Saturday sitdown, if easier for Trump’s schedule.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to make the president available,” replied Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito. “But there are limitations of my ability to do so. I have to factor the Secret Service into the equation.” He assured the court that he would immediately work with Trump’s staff to figure out his availability next week.
Representatives for Trump and ABC News did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump filed the lawsuit against ABC News and Stephanopoulos, who participated in the Friday hearing via Zoom sitting before a blue high-backed couch, earlier this year after the anchor’s on-air assertion that Trump had been “found liable for rape” by a Manhattan federal jury.
The case was filed in the Southern District of Florida, Trump’s home court, and argued that Stephanopoulos and the network defamed him when the star anchor made that claim during a combative March 10 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace.
While the jury found that Trump sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll during a mid-1990s encounter in a department store, and held him liable for battery, they did not find that she proved he raped her. Months later, however, while tossing Trump’s countersuit against Carroll, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that “Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood.”
In July, a federal judge declined to dismiss the lawsuit, a major victory for Trump, allowing it to proceed.
Trump’s lawyer on Friday argued that a deposition is unnecessary for the defense to file a motion for summary judgment, which would resolve the case without a jury trial. Brito claimed Siegel seeks to ask about what happened between the president-elect and Carroll when all that matters for a summary judgment is “whether or not the statements made by the defendants are defamatory.”
“We don’t intend to revisit the underlying question of what did or didn’t happen between President Trump and E. Jean Carroll,” Siegel responded. He said his team is “entitled” to ask Trump questions about past statements that may contradict his claim that ABC defamed him and speak to his “credibility” as a plaintiff.
Despite pushing back on the deposition request, Brito agreed to “promptly” get an answer from Trump’s team about when he could sit down.
