Trump Demands Think Tank Retract Crime Report or Face $5 Billion Lawsuit

A Research Report Becomes a Legal Battleground

A policy dispute over crime statistics has escalated into a high-stakes legal confrontation. President Donald Trump threatened a $5 billion defamation lawsuit against the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank, after it published a report concluding that his National Guard deployments had done little to reduce violent crime. The letter gave CAP until the end of business Friday to issue a retraction or face the lawsuit — and the center declined.

In July, CAP published a study analyzing the impact of Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., which he has claimed time and time again saved those cities. The report, published on July 13, criticized the administration for taking credit for a historic drop in violent crime at a time when that decline was already underway, concluding that Trump's deployment of the National Guard "had no measurable effect on violent crime trends." In reality, the report found that the effort cost $1.7 billion and did virtually nothing.

The Numbers Behind the Dispute

CAP's analysis found no evidence that National Guard deployments reduced violent crime — and if those deployments are extended through the end of 2026, they could cost American taxpayers more than $1.7 billion. The think tank's researchers examined data across multiple cities and time periods. "What we find is that across multiple cities, multiple datasets, and multiple time windows, we find no effect that violent crime actually did change post the National Guard deployment in any of the cities," said CAP's associate director of public safety, Chandler Hall.

Crime rates in Washington, D.C., one of the cities in the report and where Trump first deployed troops in August 2025, had been falling for two years before he took office and were already at their lowest point in decades. One statement from CAP read, "In an effort to falsely claim his policies have reduced crime, the president is exploiting the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with these extreme interventions."

Trump Pushes Back Hard — and CAP Refuses to Budge

Trump's personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, threatened to file a $5 billion defamation lawsuit against CAP if it did not retract the report and offer a personal apology to the president. Brito wrote that failure to retract the report would leave Trump no choice but to seek remedies for the "overwhelming financial and reputational harm that Defendants have caused him to suffer." Trump himself took to social media, calling the report "another Radical Left SCAM."

The nonprofit's president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, said in a statement that the lawsuit "is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it." The nonprofit's general counsel, Kevin Metz, said in a letter responding to the threat that the defamation allegation "is utterly absurd: truth is not and cannot be defamation. The legal standards here are clear, well-established, and speech-protective."

A Familiar Tactic With Broad Implications

Threatening lawsuits against perceived enemies or over media coverage he doesn't like is part of a well-worn playbook for Trump. But the scale of this threat — $5 billion aimed at a nonprofit research organization — raises serious questions about the chilling effect such legal pressure can have on independent policy analysis. CAP called the threatened lawsuit's "attack on facts and evidence" baseless, arguing that "a fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration."

Whether or not a lawsuit is actually filed, the confrontation puts a spotlight on a deeper tension: the government's ability to shape the public narrative around its own policies versus the role of independent research institutions in holding that narrative accountable. With the Pentagon's deployment of the National Guard in Washington projected to cost another $1.4 billion through the end of Trump's term in 2029, the financial and constitutional stakes of this fight are only likely to grow.