Trump threatens think tank that questioned crime policy

US 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.

The Washington-based Centre for American Progress was given until the end of business on Friday to issue the retraction or face a $5 billion lawsuit. The centre 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 on July 13, criticised 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 lawyer Alejandro Brito said the centre 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."

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.

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."