Donald Trump has taken a legal action against a mid-western newspaper and its pollster for “brazen election interference.”
The mid-western newspaper published a survey before the US election that allegedly showed Democrat Kamala Harris leading with three percentage points in the state.
On Tuesday, the Des Moines Register‘s parent Gannett Co slammed down the lawsuit as meritless and claimed it would vigorously defend its First Amendment rights.
The lawsuit read, “There was a perfectly good reason nobody saw this coming: because a three-point lead for Harris in deep-red Iowa was not reality. It was election-interfering fiction.”
Trump mentioned in legal papers that he wanted it to deter “radicals from continuing to act with corrupt intent in releasing polls manufactured for the purpose of skewing election results in favour of Democrats.”
Last week, the American broadcaster ABC agreed to pay $US15 million ($A24 million) toward a Trump presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit.
Des Moines Register spokeswoman Lark-Marie Anton broke silence on the lawsuit and admitted that the pre-election poll did not reflect actual results.
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit,” she said.
The alleged newspaper also released technical information to explain the data and what went wrong.
