Left: Pollster J. Ann Selzer (Jenny Condon Photography, used with permission of FIRE). Right: President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable at “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, Tuesday, July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
Attorneys for a retired 2024 election pollster and a top Iowa newspaper on Monday scathingly mocked President Donald Trump”s “transparently improper” procedural gamesmanship and asked a federal judge to consider issuing sanctions if his defiance continues.
In the view of defendants the Des Moines Register, media company Gannett, and veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer, Trump is acting like “compliance” with court orders is “optional” and, therefore, he should not be rewarded with the stay of a deadline for filing an amended federal complaint without the inclusion of “illegitimate” current and former state lawmaker “co-plaintiffs” and “without adding ‘new parties, allegations, or claims[.]”
“This is the second time Plaintiff Donald Trump has defied an order from this Court directing him to file an amended complaint removing the allegations he added ‘to defeat the Court’s jurisdiction over the case,'” the filing said. “The first time, after this Court denied Plaintiff’s remand motion and ordered him to file an amended complaint within seven days, he instead filed a motion for stay.”
“This Court promptly denied that motion and ordered Plaintiff to file his revised pleading on July 18th,” the defendants continued. “He’s now pulled the same stunt again.”
As Law&Crime previously reported, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger granted the defendants’ motion to strike the president’s notice of voluntary dismissal from the record because an appeal at that time remained pending at the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
After the 8th Circuit formally denied Trump permission to appeal, Trump “renewed” a motion for a stay of a refiling deadline that “rehashes the same rejected arguments as his prior attempt” while simultaneously asking the appellate court to consider withdrawing the mandate that returned the case to the district court, the defendants noted.
Trump’s sudden attempt to drop his federal lawsuit came as he re-filed his complaint against Selzer and the newspaper in state court in late June — a day before Iowa’s new anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) law, which the governor signed in May, was set to take effect.
Anti-SLAPP measures are designed to prevent people from being intimidated against exercising their First Amendment free speech rights due to the threat of protracted and expensive, and potentially legally baseless, lawsuits. The defendants argue that Trump’s “consumer fraud” case is one such suit.
Trump sued the Register and Selzer over a poll published ahead of the 2024 presidential election that predicted then-Vice President Kamala Harris had a slight lead over Trump in Iowa, a state he went on to win by about 13 points. Though Selzer later acknowledged the huge swing and a miss, saying that she was “humbled” by the way her career ended, litigation followed nonetheless.
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In recent weeks, the wrangling in federal court has only gotten chippier, and the timing of the “clone action” Trump filed in state court — combined with the stay requests — has everything to do with it.
“Despite the Court giving him nearly six additional weeks to file his amended complaint, Plaintiff waited until the close of business on the 18th only to ‘renew’ his already-denied motion to stay,” the defendants stated. “What is more, without bothering to tell this Court, on June 30th, Trump filed a clone action to this one in Iowa state court, asserting identical claims against identical defendants.”
“So there’s no question he had time to draft, prepare, and file the amended pleading this Court ordered. He just decided that compliance with this Court’s orders is, to him, optional,” the filing added.
The defendants asked Ebinger, a Barack Obama appointee, to order Trump to file his amended complaint within 48 hours or else “warn” him of sanctions.
“[A]fter this Court denied the Plaintiff a stay of its order requiring him to file a revised amended complaint, he decided to grant himself one. This Court should deny his ‘renewed’ motion, order that he finally file the required amended complaint within 48 hours, and warn him that failure to do so will result in sanctions,” the filing concluded.
Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
