The co-manager of President Donald Trump's successful 2024 campaign sued the Daily Beast for defamation Monday over stories regarding how much he was paid for his work.
The lawsuit on behalf of Chris LaCivita said the online publication's stories that he was paid $22 million over two years — later corrected to $19.2 million — "created the false impression that Mr. LaCivita was personally profiting excessively from his work for the campaign and that he was prioritizing personal gain over the campaign's success."
The Daily Beast said it stood by its reporting and said the lawsuit "is meritless and a transparent attempt to intimidate the Beast and silence the independent press."
Celebrity attorney Mark Geragos is representing LaCivita in the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Richmond, Virginia. The filing was first reported by Axios.
The case continues a trend of aggressive action taken against the news media by Trump and those in his orbit. Trump has sued CBS News for $20 billion over editing of a "60 Minutes" interview with his 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris, and sued the Des Moines Register over an Iowa election poll that turned out to be inaccurate. ABC News settled a lawsuit with Trump over its incorrect claim that the president had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
In his lawsuit, LaCivita said the majority of the money paid by Trump to him and his firm, Advancing Strategies LLC, was to buy media ads. He alleges that the stories created a negative perception for him and his firm and hindered the ability to attract new clients.
In a letter to Geragos last month, the Daily Beast said it would request that Trump and several of his aides be made available for discovery. The company's lawyer, Neil Rosenhouse, disputed the idea that LaCivita's business had been hurt.
"The Beast's reporting that the LLC earned millions of dollars by successfully managing President Trump's campaign is not defamatory," he wrote, "it is the opposite."
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