President Donald Trump is threatening to sue a left-leaning think tank unless it retracts a report that said his National Guard deployments to various cities did not reduce crime as he said. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.
The letter gave the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress until the end of business Friday to issue the retraction or face a $5 billion lawsuit. The center declined.
The nonprofit's president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, said in a statement that the lawsuit "is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it."
The report, published July 13, criticized the administration for taking credit for a historic drop in violent crime at a time when that decline was already underway. The analysis concluded that Trump's deployment of the National Guard "had no measurable effect on violent crime trends."
Tanden said the work was based on the nonprofit's analysis of crime data and its findings were simply "inconvenient to the Trump administration."
In the letter, sent Monday and first reported by The New York Times, Trump attorney Alejandro Brito said the center should "immediately retract the false, malicious, and defamatory statements made about President Trump."
Brito highlighted several examples of statements in the report that drew objections from Trump. One read, "In an effort to falsely claim his policies have reduced crime, the president is exploiting the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with these extreme interventions."
Brito wrote that failure to retract the report will leave Trump no choice.