Banishing a reporter: Trump escalates battle with Wall Street Journal
over Epstein story
[July 22, 2025]
By DAVID BAUDER
President Donald Trump on Monday followed up his lawsuit against The
Wall Street Journal over last week's Jeffrey Epstein story by banishing
one of the newspaper's reporters from Air Force One for an upcoming
Scotland trip.
The moves reflect Trump's aggressiveness toward media who displease him
— even a media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, with outlets that have been
friendly to him in the past.
Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Journal and
Murdoch on Friday because of the newspaper's article about a sexually
suggestive letter bearing Trump's name that was included in a 2003 album
compiled for alleged sex trafficker Epstein's birthday. The president
has denied having anything to do with it.
On Monday, the White House said it was removing a Journal reporter from
the pool covering the president's trip this weekend to his golf courses
in Turnberry and Aberdeen in Scotland. The Journal's Tarini Parti had
been scheduled to cover him on the trip.
“Due to the Wall Street Journal's fake and defamatory conduct, they will
not be one of the thirteen outlets on board,” White House press
secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
The Journal declined comment on the action.
Aggressiveness with the press is in the Trump playbook
It's a tactic the Trump White House has used before. It restricted the
access of journalists from The Associated Press to press events when the
news outlet would not change its style guidelines to reflect Trump's
renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. That launched a legal battle that is
wending its way through the courts.
The defamation lawsuit is another tool Trump has used against media
outlets. He has sued CBS News for its editing of a “60 Minutes”
interview with former opponent Kamala Harris; ABC News for a false
statement made by George Stephanopoulos in a story regarding a New York
writer who had accused Trump of sexual abuse; and Meta after it removed
Trump's social media accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the
Capitol.
In each of those cases, Trump won multimillion-dollar settlements. But
in those instances, news was only one part of a major corporation's
business. In the case of Murdoch and News Corp., news is the chief part
of his business. The Journal has vowed to fight.
It's also the first time Trump has sued for defamation as a sitting
president, and it's not clear whether any president has done that in the
past.
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President Donald Trump walks from Marine One after arriving on the
South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in
Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with a president bringing a libel
suit,” said noted free speech attorney Floyd Abrams. “But this claim
certainly seems like nothing more or less than an effort to suppress
speech that our president finds discomforting. That’s not why we
have libel law. It’s why we have a First Amendment.”
News organizations have reacted in varied ways
It's all part of a broader pattern of trying to intimidate news
organizations that report stories Trump does not like, said Jameel
Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute
at Columbia University.
“These are lawsuits that have no hope of actually succeeding as
lawsuits, but nevertheless have the potential to chill media
organizations from doing what all of us need them to do,” Jaffer
said.
Not every news organization has bowed down; “60 Minutes,” in fact,
did some notably tough stories about the early days of Trump's
second administration. But it's impossible to quantify stories that
weren't done because of fear of a fight with the White House, he
said.
The Wall Street Journal leans conservative editorially, but hasn't
been afraid to take Trump on in both its opinion and news sections.
Other Murdoch outlets — Fox News Channel and the New York Post — are
much friendlier to him.
Ever since the administration announced that it would not be
releasing additional government files from the case against Epstein,
factions of Trump's base supporters have turned on him. That has put
some normally supportive news outlets in a difficult position.
Fox News largely avoided the story after Trump suggested his allies
stop wasting time on it. But Fox's Howard Kurtz reported on The Wall
Street Journal lawsuit on his “Media Buzz” show Sunday, saying that
by doing so, “the president has drawn extra attention to the
Journal's reporting.”
The president's battle with the press has taken on several
dimensions. He has been fighting to take away government support for
news organizations like Voice of America, and last week the
Republican-controlled Congress voted to take away federal funding
from NPR and PBS because the president says their news programming
is biased against conservatives.
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