President Donald Trump listens during a briefing with the media, Friday, June 27, 2025, at the White House in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
Donald Trump is attempting to drop his federal lawsuit against The Des Moines Register newspaper and its former pollster J. Ann Selzer over a poll published ahead of the 2024 presidential election that predicted Vice President Kamala Harris had a slight lead against the former president in the state of Iowa.
Unlike other cases that Trump has voluntarily relinquished, the two sides in this case did not reach a settlement agreement. Instead, the president on Monday re-filed his complaint against Selzer and the newspaper in Iowa state court, as he had initially done before the case was removed to federal court.
A spokesperson for the Register said Trump”s move broke with procedure and was merely aimed at avoiding a loss in court. The paper also emphasized that Trump’s attempt to re-file in state court came a day before Iowa’s new anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) law, which the governor signed in May, is 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 expensive lawsuits.
“After losing his first attempt to send his case back to Iowa state court, and apparently recognizing that his appeal will be unsuccessful, President Trump is attempting to unilaterally dismiss his lawsuit from federal court and re-file it in Iowa state court,” Lark-Marie Anton, the Register’s spokesperson said in a statement to Politico. “Although such a procedural maneuver is improper and may not be permitted by the Court, it is clearly intended to avoid the inevitable outcome of the Des Moines Register’s motion to dismiss President Trump’s amended complaint currently pending in federal court.”
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Anton added that the Register “will continue to resist President Trump’s litigation gamesmanship and believes that regardless of the forum it will be successful in defending its rights under the First Amendment.”
Attorneys for the newspaper pushed back against the president’s attempt to bring the case back to state court, filing an expedited request to have Trump’s notice of voluntary dismissal stricken as “procedurally improper” because the case is currently before a federal appellate court, an appeal that was filed by the current president earlier this month after the case was removed to federal court in May.
“The case cannot be dismissed at the district court while appellate proceedings are ongoing. This is because ‘the district court is divested of jurisdiction over matters on appeal’ upon the initiation of that appeal,” attorneys representing the newspaper wrote in a six-page filing. “As President Trump’s appeal purports to attack wholesale the district court’s jurisdiction over the case, there is no part of this action that does not relate to the matters on appeal. Therefore, jurisdiction over this matter sits with the Eighth Circuit, and President Trump cannot voluntarily dismiss the action simply by filing a unilateral Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with this Court.”
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Trump in December 2024, filed the lawsuit over a poll published ahead of the 2024 presidential election that predicted Vice President Kamala Harris had a slight lead in the race that Trump would ultimately win. Selzer’s poll, which was released three days before the election, had predicted that Harris had about a three-point lead in Iowa over then-candidate Trump, who went on to win the state by about 13 points.
The complaint was filed under an Iowa law against “consumer fraud” in which the president accused Selzer and the Register of being in cahoots with “cohorts in the Democrat Party” who “hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.” The complaint accuses the defendants of committing “brazen election interference” through use of the allegedly “manipulated” poll to “deceive voters.”
The lawsuit was one of a flurry of actions initiated by Trump after winning the 2024 election, including defamation suits against ABC and star anchor George Stephanopoulos that controversially settled for $15 million and another in which the president is seeking $20 billion from CBS over a “60 Minutes” segment featuring Harris that he claimed was “doctored.”
Both parties in the CBS case on Monday requested a stay in the proceedings, telling the court that the request was “because the Parties are engaged in good faith, advanced, settlement negotiations.”
The suit against Selzer, which she and the paper have repeatedly called “frivolous,” has long been panned by legal experts who have criticized it as a quintessential SLAPP suit that imposes a steep financial burden on Selzer and the newspaper for protected speech.
“I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at UCLA School of Law, wrote after it was filed.
