Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, dared President Donald Trump to bring it on after the president launched a $10 billion libel lawsuit against the publication.
“We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting,” a spokesperson for Dow Jones said in a statement. “[We] will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
Trump filed the suit on Friday, accusing the Murdoch-owned paper of “glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting,” after the publication of a story about a gift Trump supposedly gave Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.
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The story detailed letters given to the convicted sex trafficker for his 50th birthday, which reportedly included a signed note from Trump inside a drawing of a naked woman. The note contained the chilling phrase “may every day be another wonderful secret.”
“Those are not my words,” Trump posted on Truth Social in response to the story. “Also, I don’t draw pictures.”
The WSJ has rebutted the latter claim, highlighting numerous images drawn by the president, four of which were auctioned off during his first term.
Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul behind Fox News, News Corp, and hundreds of national and international outlets, took ownership of the WSJ in 2007 following the acquisition of Dow Jones & Company.
Trump claimed that Murdoch had been personally warned not to print the letter, but he “did not have the power to do so.” Therefore, the president plans to make good on his promise to “sue his a-- off.”
The relationship between the president and the disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019, has created an almighty rift in the MAGA support base. The Trump administration’s failure to release criminal information on Epstein and his alleged “client list” has been the focus of intense, recent accusations of a coverup.
The latest round of conspiratorial outbursts follows a memo released by the Justice Department earlier this month, which claimed there was no further information to disclose about the Epstein case.
Trump has since been on the warpath, attempting to quell the rebellion and silence his critics, who believe that the Epstein files are a “hoax” constructed by the Democrats.
With yet another legal battle against a media organization on the horizon, it remains to be seen if Trump’s latest move will bring the silence he desperately wants over Epstein.
