Trump threatens CAP with $5bn suit over National Guard crime report

CAP report found Guard deployments had no measurable crime impact

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer has threatened the Center for American Progress with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit unless the think tank retracts a July report that concluded the president’s National Guard deployments in three cities had no measurable impact on crime.

Alejandro Brito, who identified himself in the letter as a personal lawyer for Trump, sent the retraction demand to CAP, the organization said Friday. The New York Times reported on the letter Friday. Brito filed the threat in Trump’s personal capacity, not on behalf of the federal government, according to the Guardian.

The targeted report, released by CAP on July 13, examined National Guard deployments in Washington DC, Memphis, and Los Angeles. The think tank argued the deployments failed to reduce crime in those cities despite an estimated cost of $1.7 billion.

To support that conclusion, the report compared crime-rate changes in cities that received Guard deployments with cities that did not. The two groups experienced similar rates of decline, according to the analysis. The report noted that violent crime began falling well before Trump took office in 2025.

In his retraction demand, Brito alleged that the report’s intended effect on readers was to suggest Trump “knowingly deceived the American people, manipulated crime statistics for political advantage, exploited public fear, abused military and executive authority for an ulterior purpose, staged a sham law enforcement operation, and then lied about its success.”

CAP responded Friday by standing by the report and denouncing the legal threat as an attack on the public’s right to speak truth to power. CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden said in a written statement that the report had documented “facts about the National Guard deployments that are inconvenient to the Trump administration.”

“This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless,” Tanden said. “A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”

CAP’s formal reply to the threat letter pushed back on the defamation claim itself. The organization called the claim “absurd” and argued the report and commentary “on their face, concern crime statistics and causality, or actions of the federal government, not President Trump himself.”

“In addition to being true, these statements cannot defame President Trump because they are not about him,” CAP wrote.

The lawsuit threat targets a think tank founded in 2003 by John Podesta, who served as the Clinton White House chief of staff and later chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The Guardian describes CAP as Washington’s leading liberal think tank.