President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice will continue to defend Donald Trump against a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of rape.
Writer E. Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump in 2019 for denying having ever met her after she claimed in a book that he raped her in the dressing room of a New York department store decades earlier.
According to BuzzFeed, the Biden Justice Department weighed in on the case for the first time on Monday evening. They wrote in their brief that Trump’s comments in response to Carroll were “crude and disrespectful,” “unwarranted,” “distasteful,” and “unnecessary and inappropriate,” but they argued that he was acting within the scope of his official duties as president and therefore his comments accusing Carroll of lying were protected as part of his presidential duties.
“When members of the White House media asked then-President Trump to respond to Ms. Carroll’s serious allegations of wrongdoing, their questions were posed to him in his capacity as President,” the Justice Department wrote in Monday’s brief, BuzzFeed reports. “Elected public officials can — and often must — address allegations regarding personal wrongdoing that inspire doubt about their suitability for office.”
The case had been making its way through New York state court until former Attorney General Bill Barr in September transferred the case to federal court, which allowed Trump’s Justice Department to represent him, according to the Hill.
The move was widely criticized at the time as a misuse of government resources to defend Trump in a private matter.
Then candidate Joe Biden even weighed in, saying, “Can you remember any Republican president going out there, or former Democratic president, ’Go find that guy and prosecute him’? You ever hear that? Or: ‘By the way, I’m being sued because a woman’s accused me of rape. Represent me. Represent me.’ … What’s that all about? What is that about?”
Carroll wrote to the Biden administration in April urging them not to represent Trump in the case arguing that it is “wrong” for attorneys to claim Trump was shielded from a defamation lawsuit because he was president at the time when he accused her of lying.
The decision by the DOJ to adopt Trump’s position in the case could lead to the case being dismissed.
The White House sought to distance itself from the DOJ brief on Monday writing in a statement: The “White House was not consulted by DOJ on the decision to file this brief or its contents.”
“And while we are not going to comment on this ongoing litigation, the American people know well that President Biden and his team have utterly different standards from their predecessors for what qualify as acceptable statements,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates wrote.
