Legal Team for E. Jean Carroll Moves to Block Justice Department’s Interference in Case Against Trump

The legal team for journalist E. Jean Carroll, who last year accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s, has moved to block the Justice Department’s attempt to intervene and replace the President’s private lawyers.

“There is not a single person in the United States — not the President and not anyone else —  whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted,” Carroll’s lawyers said, calling the Justice Department’s move “another stratagem” for Trump to “avoid accountability” after they argued Trump was “acting within the scope of his office” when he accused Carroll of lying.

“The Justice Department intervened to shield Trump from legal accountability only after his state court stall tactics, procedural gambits, and assertions of immunity were all rejected,” Carroll’s lawyers wrote. “Only in a world gone mad could it somehow be presidential, not personal, for Trump to slander a woman who he sexually assaulted.”

Attorney General William Barr justified the Justice Department’s move a day after his department intervened, saying, “The law is clear. It is done frequently. And the little tempest that’s going on is largely because of the bizarre political environment in which we live.”

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Carroll says Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman store in New York City in either 1995 or 1996 and points out that the White House has denied it.

“His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who ‘comes forward,’ so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store,” she wrote.

Alan Herrera

Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.