A new court brief filed this week is part of the president’s multi-front legal battle to limit the ability of private citizens, Congress and even law enforcement to investigate him while in office.
Lawyers for President Trump this week reiterated their argument that a defamation lawsuit from a woman who alleges Trump groped and kissed her without consent should be halted because the president is immune from lawsuits filed in state courts while serving in office.
A new 28-page court brief, filed Monday and released publicly by the New York State Court of Appeals on Tuesday, is Trump’s latest salvo in a multi-front legal battle to limit the ability of private citizens, Congress and even law enforcement to investigate him as a sitting president.
The release came on the same day that Trump’s lawyers argued to the United States Supreme Court that the president should be able to shield his tax returns and private business records from subpoenas issued by Democratic-led House congressional committees and the Manhattan district attorney. They argued the president should be immune from requests he believed were political attempts to harass.
Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s tax returns, personal financial records
The filing in New York was also a pointed reminder that Trump continues to quietly battle two women in court who allege he sexually assaulted them, fighting their efforts to obtain testimony and documents that could shed light on their accusations. The women, Summer Zervos and E. Jean Carroll, are among more than a dozen women who have accused Trump of unwanted physical contact in the years before he was elected.
Trump’s efforts to fend off their legal claims come as his allies have sought to spotlight allegations that his Democratic rival, former vice president Joe Biden, sexually assaulted a Senate aide in 1993, a claim he has denied.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, declined to comment on the Zervos and Carroll cases.
This week’s filing came in a defamation case brought by Zervos, a former contestant on the reality show “The Apprentice,” who alleges that Trump aggressively groped and kissed her in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2007, at what she thought would bea meeting to discuss a job opportunity at the Trump Organization.
She first made the allegations in October 2016 after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump could be heard bragging about grabbing women between their legs.
Trump denied her claims, calling her and other women who accused him of sexual misconduct liars who aremotivated by politics and money. In 2017, Zervos filed suit against the president, arguing that Trump defamed her by accusing her of lying about the episode.
Since then, the case has been slowly making its way through the New York court system. So far, lower-level statecourts haverejected Trump’s immunity arguments and allowed evidence to be gathered.
New York appellate court allows Summer Zervos’s defamation suit against president to proceed
Phone records released as part of the case last year showed that Trump and Zervos exchanged six telephone calls over a three-month time period around the time when she said the assault took place, including on a day when Trump’s calendar showed he was visiting Los Angeles.
