Richard Painter is one of the few reasons I bother with Twitter. Anyone who watches cable news will know this fellow as the intrepid former G.W. Bush ethics advisor and now law professor at the U. of Minnesota who is party to the C.R.E.W. lawsuit against Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause.
Prof. Painter always has something pithy and pertinent to say. Today he made this provocative suggestion:
He thinks Hillary should sue the pants off SCROTUS, using the NY Times v Sullivan as a foundation for her claim. Here’s the short-hand version of this case, courtesy of Wikipedia:
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964),[1] was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that established the actual malice standard, which has to be met before press reports about public officials can be considered to be defamation and libel;[2] and hence allowed free reporting of the civil rights campaigns in the southern United States. It is one of the key decisions supporting the freedom of the press. The actual malice standard requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case, if he is a public figure, prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the extremely high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and the difficulty of proving the defendant's knowledge and intentions, such claims by public figures rarely prevail.
Before this decision, there were nearly US $300 million in libel actions from the Southern states outstanding against news organizations, as part of a focused effort by Southern officials to use defamation lawsuits as a means of preventing critical coverage of civil rights issues in out-of-state publications. The Supreme Court's decision, and its adoption of the actual malice standard, reduced the financial hazard from potential defamation claims, and thus countered the efforts by public officials to use these claims to suppress political criticism.[3][4]
I am not a lawyer, but I love the idea of Trump being sued for anything. But sued by HRC? I’m not so sure about that. I think she has gone through quite enough and deserves a good time away from thinking about the Orange Scrotum. OTOH, I am tempted to applaud any move to whup him upside the head with a legal judgement.
Should she or shouldn’t she? Only her lawyer knows for sure...