WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is threatening to sue a left-leaning think tank unless it retracts a report that said his National Guard deployments to various cities did not reduce crime as he said.
The letter gave the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress until the end of business Friday to issue the retraction or face a $5 billion lawsuit. The center declined.
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 report, published July 13, criticized the administration for taking credit for a historic drop in violent crime at a time when that decline was already underway. The analysis concluded that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard “had no measurable effect on violent crime trends.”
Tanden said the work was based on the nonprofit's analysis of crime data and its findings were simply "inconvenient to the Trump administration.”
In the letter, sent Monday and first reported by The New York Times, Trump attorney Alejandro Brito said the center should “immediately retract the false, malicious, and defamatory statements made about President Trump.”
Brito highlighted several examples of statements in the report that drew objections from Trump. One 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.”
Brito wrote that failure to retract the report will leave Trump no choice but to seek remedies for the “overwhelming financial and reputational harm that Defendants have caused him to suffer.” Attempts to reach Brito on Friday were unsuccessful.
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.”
Threatening lawsuits against perceived enemies or over media coverage he doesn't like is part of a well-worn playbook for Trump. At the beginning of his second term, he threatened numerous legal firms with cutting off access to the federal government unless they capitulated to his various demands, which some did.
Kevin Goldberg, a First Amendment expert at the Freedom Forum, said such threats from Trump are done “for the purpose of trying to push someone into submission rather than actually on the merits of compensating Donald Trump for any harm that might have been caused.”
As members of the National Guard walk on patrol, protesters from Free DC rally against continued National Guard presence in the district, on the one year anniversary of President Trump's emergency declaration activating the National Guard, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Members of the Arkansas National Guard continue their patrol after carrying an elderly woman in her wheelchair down the steps to the train platform due to an out-of-service elevator at the Columbia Heights metro station, Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A plane that crashed at a remote military site in western Alaska, killing all eight people on board, was making its second runway approach in heavy fog when it lost contact, authorities said Friday.
The Cessna's two pilots could not see the gravel airstrip and were flying solely by instruments when the plane crashed about midday Thursday, Clint Johnson, the National Transportation Safety Board’s Alaska region chief, told a virtual news conference.
Regulations required that they abort their first landing attempt because of the lack of visibility, he said, and the plane crashed on its second attempt, about one-third of a mile (0.5 kilometers) from the runway. The runway is surrounded by mountainous terrain on three sides, and the Federal Aviation Administration recommends pilots use GPS and other instruments when they land there.
On board were the pilots, two employees of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and four contractors. Two of the contractors were employees of Calista Brice, a collection of companies that perform construction, engineering, logistics and other work in remote areas. Calista Brice is a subsidiary of Calista Corp., an Alaska Native regional corporation.
The military has not said what work they were performing at the Cape Newenham Long Range Radar Site, about 450 miles (725 kilometers) west of Anchorage on Alaska's southwest coast.
NTSB investigators were traveling to the scene Friday.
The radar site was built in the 1950s as part of a network designed to provide early warning of a missile attack by the Soviet Union. Today, it monitors the skies off the coast in the direction of Russia, North Korea and China.
Those on board were “dedicated professionals carrying out a vital mission in a demanding environment," U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Davis, commander of Alaskan Command, the Alaskan North American Aerospace Defense Command Region and Eleventh Air Force, said in a statement Thursday.
“This is a devastating loss for our military family and the communities we serve,” Davis said.
Johnson said search teams found the fragmented wreckage after the twin-engine Cessna 441, also known as a Cessna Conquest, lost contact. Its final flight path was captured by radar at the site, he said.
Weather conditions were changing Thursday as heavy fog rolled through the area. An automated observation system not far from the airport reported a low cloud ceiling, fog and visibility of about 10 miles (16 kilometers) in the minutes before the crash, but the next update about 15 minutes after it showed visibility of less than one-quarter mile (0.40 kilometers), according to Carrie Haisley, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service's Alaska sector operations center.
Mike O’Donnell, who oversaw airport safety programs and accident investigations for much of his 17 years at FAA, said it sounded as if weather conditions were bad enough that the pilots should have diverted and landed somewhere else.
The airstrip is at a private military site managed by the Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center. It’s part of a network of remote radar sites that tracks aircraft operating in Alaska’s airspace and along its borders, a statement from Alaskan Command said.
The outpost at Cape Newenham closed in 1983 after a new radar was installed, and now the site is visited only occasionally by civilian contractors who perform maintenance on the system.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the two employees who died were part of a “project delivery team en route to a project site in support of the U.S. Air Force.” The statement did not provide additional details about the work.
Johnson said the flight was operated by Security Aviation based in Anchorage. The charter company did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
Associated Press writer Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this report. Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska.
FILE - The National Transportation Safety Board logo and signage are seen at a news conference at NTSB headquarters in Washington, Dec. 18, 2017. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
