Trump blasts DOJ over decision to withdraw from E. Jean Carroll lawsuit fight

Donald Trump on Wednesday raged about the defamation lawsuit he faces from the writer E. Jean Carroll, a day after the Department of Justice dropped a three-year effort to immunize the former president from Carroll’s claims.

“The DOJ will not defend me in the E. Jean Carroll civil case, which is all part of the political Witch Hunt, lawyered up by apolitical operative who I just beat in another case, financed by a big political funder, and ‘judged’ by a Clinton appointee who truly hates ‘TRUMP,’” he wrote on his social media site.

“The Carroll civil case against me is a Miscarriage of Justice and a total Scam,” Trump added.

The DOJ’s move Tuesday was the latest in a series of bad news for Trump in connection with Carroll, who has two civil suits against him in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Both cases relate to alleged defamatory statements Trump made at different times about Carroll while denying her claim that he raped her in the mid-1990s in the dressing room of a New York department store.

The second of Carroll’s suits went to trial this spring. A jury in May awarded Carroll $5 million in damages from Trump after finding that he was liable for sexually abusing her and defaming her in statements he made about her in late 2022, when he was a private citizen. The jury did not find Trump liable for rape.

The first suit, which relates to statements Trump made about Carroll in 2019, when he was still president, is set to begin trial in January.

Since 2020, the Justice Department had argued that Trump should be replaced as a defendant in that case by the U.S. government, due to the fact that he was…