The idea that MAGA stands for Make Attorneys Get Attorneys took on a whole new meaning Friday night, when a Twitter troll did the former president a huge favor by suing the New York law clerk Donald Trump despises—the latest escalation in a legal war that shows just how dirty Trump’s court battles are getting.
Trump is currently under a severe gag order to choke off his public insults against Allison Greenfield, a lawyer who serves as the top legal adviser to the judge overseeing his potentially catastrophic bank fraud trial.
Trump has tried to tie up the courts by suing the judge and appealing the gag order to no avail. But now he’s getting extra help from Brock Fredin, a Wisconsin man who initially filed a complaint about Greenfield’s political leanings—and whose Twitter account, @JudicialProtest, was cited by Trump during one of his lying, conspiracist screeds about the law clerk.
On Thursday, Adam Klasfeld at The Messenger published an exposé revealing that the 40-year-old “has a prolific history of civil and criminal litigation over his harassment of women that echoes his attacks on Greenfield.” That evening, Fredin promised to sue.
Fredin whined about Klasfeld’s “HACK reporting” and wrote, “I have done nothing but exercise my FIRST AMENDMENT right to criticize the misconduct of a public official.”
On Friday, he went through with it, filing a defamation lawsuit in New York State against three parties: Greenfield, The Messenger, and Klasfeld. He claims Klasfeld falsely “inferred, intimate and stated” that Fredin was a Trump “agent or proxy” trying to help the former president circumvent the gag order—and that the article was written “at the behest of” Greenfield.
Neither Klasfeld nor the media outlet immediately responded late Friday night.
But while the lawsuit looks like a run-of-the-mill legal action against a reporter and alleged source, it’s better understood as a wrench thrown into the slowly grinding gears of justice—yet another mini-legal battle against the players trying to hold Trump accountable by turning the heavy load of the bureaucratic judicial system against itself. Until now, Trump has been trying to slow down a dozen criminal and civil cases by flooding the court system with appeals and spurious lawsuits. It appears his supporters are now jumping in to help him.
