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President Trump on Tuesday again refiled a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a July 2025 report that he submitted a letter and explicit drawing to a birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein.A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last month, ruling he couldn’t claim the paper published the story with actual malice. Then Trump refiled and ran into another stumbling block on May 13, when U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that he couldn’t use the discovery process in his claims that the newspaper defamed him. In the new lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the Journal’s reporters tried to “falsely pass off as fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter” but “failed to show proof.”Trump’s reasoning for the lawsuit is hollow, especially considering that the House Oversight Committee included the birthday book, complete with the drawing from Trump, in a September release of Epstein materials from his estate. It’s more likely that Trump is trying to shake down the Journal for a big settlement and intimidate its owners, the Murdoch family, into favorable coverage.It’s a pattern that Trump has followed against other media companies, which ended up forking over money that supposedly is going to Trump’s presidential library. Trump also has pending defamation lawsuits against The New York Times for $15 billion and the BBC for $10 billion. It seems that he won’t stop until he’s made them pay for reporting that he doesn’t like.

Drop Site Daily: May 28, 2026

The Trump administration is giving Venezuela’s new leadership a free pass.The White House has instructed federal prosecutors in Miami to avoid criminal investigations into acting President Delcy Rodríguez, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.Rodríguez has been on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s radar since at least 2018, and has been tied to all sorts of criminal activity ranging from drug trafficking to gold smuggling. But all of that is apparently being brushed under the rug, as the Trump administration shows blatant favoritism toward the leader it installed earlier this year.It is not clear if prosecutors were working toward charging Rodríguez with a crime. A Justice Department spokesperson told the AP in an email that “there was never an investigation into her to shut down.”U.S. officials told the AP that the directive was intended to ease Rodríguez’s transition into power in Venezuela, and to avoid further destabilizing the oil-rich nation.Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to invade Venezuela in early January, sending hundreds of troops through its capital city, Caracas, to capture the country’s 13-year ruler, Nicolás Maduro. Maduro and his wife were transported to New York to face federal narcotics charges, to which they both have pleaded not guilty.Trump failed to notify Congress before doing so, but he didn’t forget to tip off his friends at America’s biggest oil companies, which stand to gain the most from America’s newfound control over Venezuela’s oil supply—the largest in the world.Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, was the major political benefactor of his sudden abduction. Despite her criminal affiliations, the Trump administration has opened the door for her to do business with the U.S., lifting sanctions (that were placed during Trump’s first term after she undermined Venezuelan democracy by supporting Maduro’s authoritarian rule) and allowing her to reestablish ties with U.S. banks, according to the Associated Press. Beyond that, Trump has uplifted her name in an effort to sanitize her character, describing her as a “terrific person.”

Molly Jong-Fast is back with Mehdi for a live show with On Air Presents in New York to rank the field of Democratic presidential hopefuls by their greatest strengths and most glaring weaknesses.

The former magazine columnist prevailed in separate lawsuits against the president for sexual abuse and defamation.