While Donald Trump is returning to the White House with sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution, that won’t necessarily keep him out of the courtroom or free from testimony under oath.
Nearly a dozen civil suits at the trial-level in federal court have Trump as a defendant. The lawsuits – including a defamation case from the Central Park Five, eight lawsuits over Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and two cases related to the clearing of racial justice protesters from the park outside the White House in June 2020 – are likely to hang over his presidency.
And the president-elect’s own legendary litigious streak continues this week, with the newly filed lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and a pollster who predicted he would lose Iowa, which he didn’t. This adds to other pending lawsuits he’s filed against media outlets, and he has threatened more.
If any of the lawsuits were to move forward toward trial, Trump could be forced to turn over private communications in the evidence-gathering phase or sit for videotaped depositions. Depositions, because they are under oath, always carry some legal exposure and could add to the political headaches for Trump in the coming years, as they have between his terms in the presidency.
“I think when he is forced to sit and play by the rules, listen to questions, and answer them, he has difficulty doing that. When you’re the deponent, you’re not in control of the room,” Brigida Benitez, a lawyer who previously deposed Trump two weeks before his 2017 inauguration, said in an interview. She represented chef Jose Andres, who was sued by Trump after he pulled out of a restaurant deal in Trump’s former Washington, DC, hotel.
What Trump said in that deposition is still private, and the case settled.
Cases Trump brought
It’s unclear when Trump will be under oath again. Trump’s legal exposure in current lawsuits may be minimal for several months, if not years.
Earlier this week, Trump narrowly avoided testifying in a lawsuit where he had sued ABC News. The case settled days before he and anchor George Stephanopoulos were to sit for depositions, with ABC News agreeing to donate $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum and $1 million for his legal fees to end the case. It was a rare win for Trump in cases he’s brought.
First Amendment experts and other lawyers have widely criticized Trump’s lawsuits against media organizations, saying many of them are unlikely to succeed legally.
But Trump bringing the cases carry little immediate legal risk for him, Ty Cobb, who defended Trump in the presidency during his first term and is now critical of him, told CNN.
“That’s like playing in the sandbox for him,” Cobb said of the litigation against media, adding that any potentially embarrassing revelations in a civil deposition are unlikely to pose a political risk.
“He seems to be immune to embarrassment,” Cobb said.
Jesse Binnall, Trump’s primary lawyer in several of his civil cases, didn’t respond to an inquiry from CNN for this story.
Trump is still pressing forward in two lawsuits in federal court – against CBS News alleging deception and against the book publisher Simon & Shuster over the release of 19 interviews recorded by journalist Bob Woodward for his book “Rage.”
Bouyed by the ABC settlement, Trump’s attorneys tried to move the Simon & Shuster lawsuit forward quickly in court this week toward evidence-gathering, but the judge said they must wait for a decision on a different set of legal arguments.
“We trust that the Court can accommodate a discovery process that will cause minimal interference with the President’s impeding obligations,” Trump’s lawyers wrote last month to the judge in the Simon & Shuster case, referring to evidence-gathering that could happen if the case isn’t thrown out.
Trump as a civil defendant
Lawsuits where Trump is a defendant in federal court continue on as well. They are likely to move slowly as courts untangle the law around the presidency and other legal questions. Generally, courts make sure litigation won’t burden the work of the sitting president.
The standard in court, set in the case of Bill Clinton v. Paula Jones by the Supreme Court in 1997, is that sitting presidents don’t have immunity from civil lawsuits. Yet the case also held that when a sitting president is deposed in a lawsuit, the testimony shouldn’t be too disruptive to the president’s work running the country.
The January 6 lawsuits – where eight different individuals or groups are seeking to hold Trump accountable for injuries people suffered in the attack on the Capitol – are still in a phase where Trump provided written answers to just a few dozen questions.
A federal judge in Washington, Amit Mehta, is likely to decide this year if Trump will have immunity for his actions on January 6.
(The immunity question in the January 6 lawsuits is different than the situation the Supreme Court decided last summer, in giving Trump presidential immunity protection, as a criminal defendant, for his official acts while in office. Justice Department prosecutors have dropped the criminal case against Trump as well as the criminal case against him over his handling of classified documents.)
One of the lawyers suing Trump related to January 6, in an interview with CNN, said there could be years of proceedings before the case would look at whether Trump should testify under oath.
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you whether that will be necessary. We haven’t by any means decided if we would need to take President Trump’s deposition,” said Joe Sellers, who represents Democratic House members in the January 6 lawsuits.
The lawsuits over the clearing of racial justice protesters in Lafayette Park in 2020 also have tried to hold Trump accountable, but the Justice Department this year has been arguing in court that Trump should have protection for what he did when clearing the park and then walking across it for a photo-op. The DOJ says those actions took place while Trump was head of the federal government, so the government should be able to stand in for him as the defendant, effectively ending plaintiffs’ claims against Trump himself.
Federal Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington, a Trump appointee, is now poised to decide if the DOJ can substitute in for Trump in the case.
No matter what, Lee Crain, the lawyer for some of the plaintiffs hurt in Lafayette Park, said Trump could end up answering questions under oath for the lawsuit while he is president.
“In the next four years, I don’t think this case is going away. Whether he’s a defendant or a witness, what he has to say about it will be relevant to this case,” Crain told CNN.
Past Trump depositions
In the four years Trump’s been out of office and campaigning again, he’s testified under oath for lawsuits a handful of times. Those include in response to columnist E. Jean Carroll’s abuse and defamation claims against him, where the litigator Roberta Kaplan questioned him under oath at Mar-a-Lago.
Juries ultimately decided in Carroll’s favor, awarding her $88 million in two separate cases.
At the Carroll trials, video clips of his deposition were played in the federal courtroom for the jury.
The Carroll case provided fodder for political attacks against Trump, including when Trump said in now-public deposition video that he mistook a photo of Carroll for his former wife Marla Maples, while at the same time was trying to say Carroll wasn’t his type.
In another case that’s still partially ongoing, Trump testified as a witness about the firing of two FBI employees he spent years publicly attacking, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
A federal judge in Washington, DC, Amy Berman Jackson, tightly regulated how Trump would be forced to answer questions in that case, saying last year he must sit for a deposition of no more than two hours.
At the time, the judge noted Trump wouldn’t be too burdened by giving the testimony, noting “the former President’s schedule appears to be able to accommodate other civil litigation that he has initiated.”
That deposition is still confidential. Strzok and Page settled with the Justice Department on privacy violation claims, though the DOJ is still at odds with Strzok over his firing.
The Justice Department in the Strzok case tried to argue in an unusual appeal against a deposition of Trump as a former president – indicating that even in a Biden-led administration, the executive branch would muster significant legal arguments to protect Trump’s work whilepresident from scrutiny in civil cases.
Trump’s Justice Department is likely to take the same position, if not more stridently, to protect Trump while he is in the White House.
