Why was the New York-based Trump suing the New York-based Paramount in Amarillo, Texas, you ask? A lot of people—i.e., ones with eyes and brains—have suggested that it might have something to do with the fact that Amarillo has only one U.S. District Judge covering it: The Hon. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who’s spent his entire bench term shooting down Biden administration rulings on immigration, health care, and discrimination. Although Trump has since added an actual Texan to the suit, in the form of Rep. Ronny Jackson, the sloppiness of the whole thing—including Trump’s claim that Paramount somehow financially harmed him, as the owner of a social media service, by editing down parts of Harris’ comments on Israel in order to “draw away attention” from his rants on Truth Social—underscores the actual goal of this whole thing. To wit, that it was never intended to be about anything except pointing a big legal gun at Paramount’s head, the better to extract cash and supplication from the company. It has, after all, worked exactly like that in multiple cases at this point, with Disney and Meta both shelling out. But despite bending on some of Trump’s anti-D.E.I. schtick, Paramount hasn’t played ball here, instead threatening to expose Trump’s own financials, and now pushing for this dismissal instead of going for the settlement.
CBS lawyers went hard in the dismissal filing, calling the suit “an affront to the First Amendment and is without basis in law or fact,” and accusing Trump and his handlers of seeking to “punish a news organization for constitutionally protected editorial judgments they do not like.” Noting that a) plaintiff-come-lately Jackson has lived in Washington D.C. for the last decade, and b) that the suit doesn’t even allege that he watched the Harris interview, the motion lays out the whole thing in pretty bare language: “The interview of Vice President Kamala Harris, excerpts of which aired on Face the Nation and 60 Minutes, was not filmed, edited, or produced in Texas, nor was Texas in any way the subject of the interview. If this district has personal jurisdiction merely because CBS programs are broadcast nationwide, so too does every district court in the country. That is not the law.” Paramount is calling for a full dismissal—or, barring that, a change of venue to New York.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]
