Alejandro Brito, the lead attorney in President Donald Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, told Newsmax on Monday that there was no veracity to a report that Trump wrote a bawdy letter as part of a tribute for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003.
The Journal alleged Thursday that Trump wrote and signed a letter that included a drawing of a naked woman for the convicted sex offender. The letter, which the Journal reported it had reviewed, included several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman. It ended: "Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret."
The Journal alleged the letter was part of a package gathered for Epstein's birthday by socialite Ghislaine Maxwell from Epstein's associates.
"They reached out to the president and advised him that they were going to be reporting about this artificial or disingenuous letter that they claim exists," Brito told "Rob Schmitt Tonight." "[They] never provided an opportunity for the president to see what they were referring to because it doesn't exist. There is no veracity to their story.
"We explained to them that this was not a genuine letter, that there was no truth behind the story that this was something that the president had authored. … There's a reason why it's being published now, and the timing is intentional.
"And there's really a lot of bad faith from our perspective as to when it was released and how this story was run because we tried to communicate to them, and despite our efforts, they went ahead and published this article, which we believe is a defamatory statement. It's libelous, and it's conduct that evidences the bad faith in which they traveled with."
A spokeswoman for Dow Jones & Company, Inc., the Journal's publisher, said Monday, "We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit."
News Corp., the Journal's parent company, is also named in the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Florida.
Pages from the leather-bound album were assembled three years before Epstein was arrested in 2006 and among the documents examined by Department of Justice officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, the Journal reported, citing people who have reviewed the pages.
Epstein died by suicide in August 2019 in federal custody while awaiting trial.
To prevail in the lawsuit, Trump must show the defendants acted with "actual malice," meaning they knew the article was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth.
"The president is absolutely confident that this is not his letter … and he's very is confident about the filing of this lawsuit because there's a malicious intent behind publishing stories such as this, making allusions to this [birthday] card and not having even had the decency to communicate with him.
"Even after we reached out to them, they alluded to the fact that they would address this problem, and despite making such statements to him and to the administration, they published the article and went ahead with this false, defamatory, really, really harmful story that, as we noted in our lawsuit, has now been disseminated to hundreds of millions of people.
"And it's been rebroadcast, republished. It's really a political attack on him. It's a personal attack on him."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.