After weeks of nasty posts about the vice president Kamala HarrisOctober 7 interview with 60 minutesformer president Donald Trump DEPOSIT a $10 billion lawsuit against the network on Thursday’s program — alleging “illegal acts of election and voter interference.” The lawsuit is frivolous, First Amendment advocates agree. But he will appear before the judge Matthew Kacsmarykan activist named Trump who historically it has not he allowed legal or intellectual rigor to get in the way of his ideology.

The lawsuit speaks to the hostile atmosphere American journalism will face during a second Trump administration: Both on social media and on the campaign trail, the GOP presidential candidate has threatened to shut down journalists and called on major networks to lose their broadcast licenses. However, few networks have drawn Trump’s ire like CBS, which aired an interview with Harris earlier this month.

60 minutes has traditionally interviewed both presidential candidates in election years, but Trump declined the program’s invitation because of concerns that his producers would check him out. Instead, the former president took umbrage at the show on Truth Social, where he claimed, without evidence, that 60 minutes altered Harris’ interview to make her seem smarter and more articulate. Trump’s lawyers made similar claims in court filings, arguing that CBS’s editing of the interview amounted to “an unspoken attempt to interfere in the 2024 US presidential election.” Rebecca TushnetFrank Stanton professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, called the lawsuit “freshly ridiculous (that) should be scoffed at” in comments on CNN. For its part, CBS has strongly denied Trump’s allegations that the edits to Harris’ interview were excessive or unfair. In a statement dated October 20network reps invited the former president to tell them to their face, so to speak, “If he wanted to discuss the issues facing the nation and the Harris interview, we’d be happy to have 60 minutes.”

Notably, Trump’s lawyers filed their case in the Amarillo division of the U.S. District Court in North Texas — on the face of it, an unusual choice for a candidate based in Florida and a network based in New York. But the choice of venue guarantees the case will come before Kacsmaryk, an outspoken conservative who has developed a national reputation for his sympathy for anti-abortion, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ plaintiffs.

The case also presents the potential fate of First Amendment rights in Trump’s second term. In addition to his ongoing dispute with CBS, the former president last month asked ABC to do it he loses his license after checking it during a debate in September and he asked last year that NBC be investigated for “treason”. Trump also promised to throw journalists, editors and publishers in jail for protecting confidential sources. “When this person realizes she’s going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, she’s going to say, ‘I’d really like to tell you exactly who it was,'” Trump said at a 2022 rally.

Press freedom organizations warn that Trump’s rhetoric has already made journalism more dangerous. A The February survey of more than 600 journalists across the US found that more than a third had been threatened with physical violence. Many described feeling particularly at risk while covering Trump rallies and Stop the Steal protests.