President Donald Trump has attacked press freedom in many ways, using private litigation as well as the powers of his office. While some corporations settled meritless lawsuits to curry favor with the administration, the Des Moines Register, its parent company, and its former pollster fought back.
They were vindicated this week, when a Polk County District Court dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against Ann Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register, and the Gannett Corporation. Trump, U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and former State Senator Brad Zaun claimed the final Iowa Poll before the 2024 election constituted consumer fraud. That poll indicated that Democratic candidate Kamala Harris led the presidential race in Iowa by 3 points. Days later, Trump carried the state by a 13-point margin.
Robert Corn-Revere, who argued on Selzer’s behalf as chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said during a January court hearing that in 40 years of practicing First Amendment law, he’s never seen a more frivolous lawsuit than this one.
Over more than 60 pages, District Court Judge Scott Beattie comprehensively rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments and dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. The judge wrote that the lawsuit “seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability. After considering the parties’ arguments, the Court must conclude that the protection is too great and the reach is too far.”
It’s worth walking through the key points, since a spokesperson for Trump told some media the president “will take his powerful case to the Iowa Supreme Court […].” I doubt he’ll have better luck there.
“This case is different”
At no point since Trump filed the first version of this lawsuit did plaintiffs offer any evidence to support their assertion that Selzer & Co. fabricated poll numbers, or that the Register deliberately published false information to influence the presidential election.
But at this stage, the District Court wasn’t trying to determine whether any of the allegations had merit. Rather, Judge Beattie was considering two motions to dismiss the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Selzer and the Des Moines Register/Gannett.
Iowa courts don’t often grant motions to dismiss. Judges are supposed to assume that what plaintiffs allege is true, and allow lawsuits to proceed if plaintiffs have made any “legally recognizable claim.”
At a July 10 hearing, Judge Beattie heard arguments for about two hours, covering First Amendment case law and many nuances related to Iowa’s consumer fraud statute and civil procedure rules. For those who want additional details, I posted the audio from that hearing and live-tweeted the proceedings (those threads start here and here). You can find all of the legal arguments in FIRE’s motion to dismiss on behalf of Selzer, the press defendants’ motion to dismiss, the plaintiffs’ brief in opposition to motions to dismiss, and reply briefs filed for Selzer and the Des Moines Register/Gannett.
Inside the courtroom before the July 10 hearing. Far left: Ann Selzer. Seated at tables, from left: FIRE chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere, attorney for the press defendants Nick Klinefeldt, and plaintiffs’ attorney Alan Ostergren in the foreground (photo by Laura Belin)
After oral arguments, Judge Beattie warned litigants that due to other cases and a scheduled trial, it would take him several weeks to get an order out. You’ll understand why when you see how thoroughly the September 23 decision addressed the relevant points. Here’s the full text:
The judge acknowledged that “nearly every case will survive a motion to dismiss.” However, he found this “extraordinary” case was not comparable to those plaintiffs cited.
“This case is different,” the judge wrote. “This suit involves speech on a matter of public interest and concern, and allowing a legally faulty claim like this to proceed carries a cost that an ordinary case does not, because defending it can discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs.”
The ruling laid out “two independent reasons” the plaintiffs failed to state any valid legal claim. Pages 10 through 25 addressed the constitutional protections of free expression.
“The First Amendment clearly applies”
After initially filing suit over the erroneous poll in December 2024, Trump and his co-plaintiffs filed a new version of the lawsuit on June 30, 2025—one day before Iowa’s “anti-SLAPP” law went into effect. That law “directs Iowa courts to resolve claims arising from the exercise of free speech on a matter of public concern at the earliest available stage,” Judge Beattie observed.
Although the anti-SLAPP law doesn’t apply to Trump’s lawsuit, “the statute confirms a concern the First Amendment has long reflected: that erroneous statements are inevitable in free debate and must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space they need to survive.”
The plaintiffs didn’t concede their action implicates the First Amendment, saying “this case has nothing to do with a government attempt to chill private speech.” Instead, they described plaintiffs as “private parties who were deceived and subjected to actual harm in material ways by the profit-driven actions of Defendants.”
The Polk County District Court disagreed, citing decades of case law since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan—”which was itself a private tort action between private parties.” The upshot: “Just because a private party rather than a prosecutor seeks the sanction does not remove the constitutional protection,” the judge wrote. “The First Amendment clearly applies in this case.”
“A journalist’s article is not commercial speech”
Not all speech is protected under the First Amendment. Plaintiffs pointed out that “it is black letter law that misrepresentations in the commercial context are not constitutionally protected.” They called it “a classic consumer-protection violation” for a for-profit company to manufacture and promote “false” polls.
The District Court rejected that argument for two reasons. “The reporting Plaintiffs challenge here proposed no transaction whatsoever; it merely reported the results of a poll of Iowa voters conducted before a national election. A journalist’s article is not commercial speech, and the presence of commercial matter in a publication does not turn the publication into commercial speech.”
More broadly, Judge Beattie noted that courts have long rejected the idea that all speech produced for profit is commercial speech. “Books, newspapers, and films are sold for profit, but that has never been enough to take away their protection.”
He went on: “Election polling is speech protected by the First Amendment, […] Reporting such a poll during a presidential and congressional election year is speech about a matter of public concern, occupying the summit of the pyramid of First Amendment values.”
“The fraud exception is narrow”
After finding that “the speech at issue in this case is protected political speech,” the court examined whether the Iowa Poll and the Register’s coverage of it could be considered fraud and therefore not protected by the constitution.
As I’ve written before, neither Selzer nor the Register would have any incentive to fabricate poll numbers, because a reputation for accuracy is valuable for pollsters and news organizations. But remember: at this stage of litigation, the judge was assuming the plaintiffs’ claims were true and looking at applicable case law.
Unfortunately for Trump and the other plaintiffs, the U.S. Supreme Court has never said “false statements by themselves are not entitled to First Amendment protection.” Moreover, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (whose rulings are binding in Iowa) “held that even knowingly false campaign speech is not excluded from the Amendment’s protection.”
Plaintiffs have portrayed the Iowa Poll as consumer fraud. But “The fraud exception is narrow,” Judge Beattie wrote. “A false statement alone does not produce liability. Rather, the constitutional exception involves a false claim made to secure money or other valuable consideration.” (emphasis in original)
Not all false speech is fraud, even if the speaker knowingly lies. And in the context of “protected political speech,” plaintiffs would need to show the representation was “for the purpose of persuading the Plaintiff to part with money or property of value in reliance upon it.”
“Whatever that may be, that is not fraud”
Trump’s suit purported to have “overwhelming evidence” that the pre-election poll “was not a statistical anomaly but was deliberately manipulated.” But the court held that opinion polls “are snapshots with margins of error, and campaigns are dynamic. A statement of conjecture about a future state of affairs is not provably false, even when the speaker is alleged to have known better.”
In addition, “The constitutional fraud exception reaches lies told to obtain money or property.” This lawsuit doesn’t state that kind of claim, Judge Beattie held.
No Plaintiff pleads that J. Ann Selzer or Selzer & Company communicated with him or her, solicited anything from him or her, or had any relationship with any Plaintiff, arising out of contract or otherwise. No Plaintiff pleads that he or she purchased the Iowa Poll, subscribed to the Register because of the Poll, or gave anything of value to any Defendant because of the Poll. Plaintiffs merely plead that false statements were published to the public and that bad things ensued. Whatever that may be, that is not fraud.
During the July 10 hearing, Trump’s attorney Alan Ostergren argued that plaintiffs suffered damages, largely because their campaigns had to spend money in the final days before the election to counter the narrative created by the Iowa Poll.
No dice, the judge said: “That a plaintiff was harmed does not establish that the speech was used to obtain money or property from him. […] Plaintiffs allege consequences. They do not allege a transaction.”
For those reasons, the fraud exception doesn’t apply, and the First Amendment bars all of the plaintiffs’ claims. The judge briefly addressed a few other constitutional issues, finding the plaintiffs failed to show “actual malice” (deliberate falsification or knowingly publishing fabricated numbers). He also agreed with defendants that it would be unconstitutional for a court to enjoin the Register from publishing “false polls” in the future, and that making a pollster liable for an inaccurate poll could not withstand the legal standard of “strict scrutiny.”
Court rejects all fraud claims
The constitutional analysis alone would justify dismissing Trump’s lawsuit, so Judge Beattie’s decision could have ended there. But on pages 26-60, the order provided other reasons to reject the lawsuit, “which rests on Iowa law alone. The conclusions that follow would require the Court to dismiss all three Counts, even if the First Amendment did not.”
In this part of the decision, the court assumed all the plaintiffs’ allegations were true: “the published methodology was not followed, the sample was deliberately weighted toward Democrats, the numbers were ultimately fabricated, and the Defendants knew of this fabrication at the time of publication.” Even in that scenario, Trump and the other plaintiffs failed to state a legally valid claim.
Judge Beattie explained again that “fraud is not the same as lying.” It’s “not just a false statement, but a statement made in the course of persuading the plaintiff to part with money or property in reliance on it.”
Plaintiffs also failed to show damages caused by the poll. A campaign spending money is not the same as the candidate personally having to spend money. Former State Senator Zaun claimed the Iowa Poll contributed to his election loss, even though Selzer didn’t publish any findings about state legislative races. Because so many factors could affect an election result, courts typically do not award damages to losing candidates. (Redistricting was a more obvious reason for Zaun’s defeat; as I observed long before the 2024 election, his new district leaned Democratic and did not include precincts that provided his margin of victory in 2020.)
“The newspaper is not consumer merchandise”
The court ruling laid out many reasons the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act does not cover the conduct at issue in Trump’s lawsuit. That law “does not forbid deception at large. It requires (1) consumer merchandise, (2) an advertisement, sale, or lease of that merchandise, and (3) a connection between the challenged act and that transaction.”
Plaintiffs failed here on every level.
While a newspaper can be consumer merchandise when a subscriber buys it for the household, the Petition describes a different purpose. Specifically, it alleges that Plaintiffs were injured as candidates, that President Trump diverted campaign and financial resources to Iowa, that Representative Miller-Meeks was forced to fight a recount, and that Zaun lost his Senate seat.128 Those are the purposes and the injuries of a candidate, not of a household reader.
Anyway, a “political opinion poll commissioned by a newspaper is not an object offered for sale to a household.”
Furthermore, the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act “requires the misrepresentation or fraud to be in connection with ‘the advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise.’” But “the polls themselves asked no one to take on an obligation or to buy anything. In fact, the Petition alleges that Defendants’ publishing of the polls was to change the outcome of elections, not to sell newspapers, and that the articles were available free to the public until Defendants placed them behind a paywall in response to Plaintiffs’ lawsuit.”
The law also “requires that the challenged conduct be ‘in connection with’ the sale,” but none of the plaintiffs in this case allege that they “bought the newspaper because of the poll.” The plaintiffs “are not consumers as defined in the statute.”
Finally, plaintiffs suing under Iowa’s consumer fraud law must show that they suffered losses because they relied on deceptive statements or conduct. But after the Register published the Selzer poll, “President Trump publicly rejected the poll as ‘a fake poll’ conducted by ‘a Trump hater’ who had ‘oversampled, by a lot, Democrats.’182 A party who publicly called the poll false did not rely on it, whether or not it was fabricated.”
Fraudulent misrepresentation claim fails
The plaintiffs alleged that the pre-election poll amounted to “fraudulent misrepresentation.” That shoe didn’t fit either. Plaintiffs haven’t shown any “relationship” with Selzer or her polling firm, any communication with her, or any transaction with her.
They didn’t show they spent money because they relied “on the truth of the representation.” On the contrary: they claim their campaigns spent money to counteract reporting on a poll they believed to be false, a survey “so implausible that no objective pollster could have honestly advanced it.” Plus, campaign spending is not the same as an out-of-pocket loss for a consumer.
Negligent misrepresentation claim fails
Trump’s lawsuit pursued a third count—”negligent misrepresentation”—as a fallback if the court found Selzer and the Register did not intentionally fake a poll. The concept is that the defendants should have known the poll was inaccurate, based on previous election results in Iowa and other pollsters’ findings in 2024. So publishing the Selzer poll was “reckless or at minimum, negligent.”
Even assuming “the numbers were invented and that the Defendants knew it when they published,” there was no prior relationship between the parties to provide this kind of information.
Iowa case law on negligent misrepresentation has dealt with defendants who act “in an advisory capacity” and know how the information they supply will be used. Examples would include “accountants, abstractors, attorneys, appraisers, school guidance counselors, and investment brokers,” the court explained.
In this case it is clear that neither Defendant stood in a position recognized by Iowa Courts in relationship to any Plaintiff. No Plaintiff hired J. Ann Selzer or Selzer & Company. No Plaintiff hired the Des Moines Register.263 Whatever duty Selzer owed, she owed to the newspaper that contracted for her work.
U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger reached the same conclusion when dismissing a federal lawsuit against Selzer and the Des Moines Register. The plaintiff in that case was a Register subscriber who copied Trump’s consumer fraud and misrepresentation claims. Judge Ebinger found, “The relationship between a newspaper and the public is fundamentally different from the relationship between an accountant or attorney and his or her client.”
During the July 10 hearing, Judge Beattie asked the attorneys about Brandt v. Weather Channel, Inc. In that case, a court rejected a wrongful death suit over an inaccurate weather forecast, finding that publishers should not be held liable for predicting possible future events.
Summing up his reasons for rejecting all of Trump’s claims, the judge wrote, “The three counts fail for reasons unrelated to the truth of the polls. Each cause of action the Plaintiffs invoke requires a connection between these parties that the Petition never pleads.”
While answering questions from the judge at the July 10 hearing, Ostergren gave a few examples of facts Trump and other plaintiffs would want to develop through discovery: “how the poll was conducted, whether a poll was conducted at all, what was known and understood by the participants in the publication process, what decisions were made about reweighting the sampled populations, and what the Register’s political reporters were telling the editorial team.”
The court noted in the September 23 ruling,
Every item on that list is an account of how the poll was made. None of it supplies an act in connection with the advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise. None of it supplies a consumer transaction between these parties. None of it supplies a legal duty running from a pollster or a newspaper to a candidate. None of it identifies an act any Plaintiff took in reliance on the poll. And none of it converts an electoral injury into an ascertainable pecuniary loss.
All in all, a comprehensive defeat for Trump. The only silver lining for the plaintiffs was that the court rejected the request for sanctions against Ostergren. Selzer’s legal team had argued that “sanctions may be appropriate where an attorney has no authority to support a novel claim.”
“Laughable from the beginning”
The defendants celebrated the District Court ruling. Polly Grunfeld Sack, chief legal counsel for USA TODAY Co. (part of Gannett’s newspaper holdings), said in a statement, “We are gratified that the court recognized what this meritless lawsuit sought to obscure: that claims of ‘fake news’ are little more than an attempt to punish news outlets for coverage those in power do not like.” She added that the decision “reaffirms the enduring First Amendment principles that empower journalists and sends a message to those who think they can intimidate the press through legal action.”
Corn-Revere said in a news release from FIRE, “We’re pleased that the court recognized what we’ve said all along: This lawsuit was laughable from the beginning and never should have been brought. The First Amendment does not allow anyone in government, least of all the president, to punish people under the banner of ‘fake news.’ That may work for him as a campaign slogan, but it is not a thing in the law.”
FIRE has represented Selzer pro bono throughout this litigation. The organization’s news release argued,
This was never about “consumer fraud.” Nor was it about winning in court. Trump’s lawsuit was about intimidating perceived critics into silence by making them waste time and money on lawyers to defend perfectly legal speech. It’s called a “SLAPP” suit — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. Such tactical claims are filed purely for the purpose of imposing punishing litigation costs on perceived opponents, not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success. In other words, the lawsuit is the punishment. And it’s part of a worrying trend of activists and officials using consumer fraud lawsuits to target political speech they don’t like.
In her written statement, Selzer expressed gratitude that the court ruling “reaffirms the fundamental freedom to pursue and publish the truth without political interference.” She told the Des Moines Register, “There is no case here. It’s just that simple — that’s what Judge Beattie concluded. I am grateful for the diligence the court demonstrated in this ruling. If this dismissal puts the matter to rest finally, that is a good outcome.”
For now, the matter hasn’t been put to rest. Several media quoted a statement provided by Trump’s legal team: “President Trump is committed to holding responsible those who traffic in deception and fake news. Such fraud cannot be allowed to stand, and President Trump will take his powerful case to the Iowa Supreme Court in order to see it through to a just and winning conclusion.”
The Iowa Supreme Court has a history of protecting the First Amendment, including a unanimous ruling in a 2014 defamation case that stemmed from an inaccurate political commercial. I will be surprised if any justices find Trump and his fellow plaintiffs stated a valid claim.
Meanwhile, Gannett will continue to pay attorneys, and FIRE’s staff will devote resources to this case that they could have spent elsewhere. Since Trump beat the clock by filing this suit before the anti-SLAPP law went into effect, defendants won’t be able to go after the president to recover their legal fees, even if the Iowa Supreme Court affirms Judge Beattie’s decision.