Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: Trump Is Suing Rupert Murdoch

Episode Date: July 19, 2025

Tim Miller takes on Trump’s new bizarre lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over an embarrassing Epstein birthday note, and the collapse of his absurd case against Bob Woodward.

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Go to liquidiv.com and get 20% off your first order with code indulge20 at checkout. That's code indulge20 at liquidiv.com. Hey, everybody. Tim Miller from The Bullock. We've got two breaking news stories regarding Donald Trump's frivolous lawsuits. First, he has now officially filed a suit against the Wall Street Journal, claiming libel and slander over their publication of the body birthday note that he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein for Epstein's 50th birthday.

Basically simultaneously to this, a judge has thrown out Trump's suit against Bob Woodward. Trump's trying to sue so many media outlets into submission. I kind of forgot about the Bob Woodward suit. This suit was as silly as it sounds. It was over the fact that Woodward released the audio tapes of the interview that Trump did with him. I guess Trump was claiming that the publisher wasn't authorized to sell the audio tapes. Who knows? And Trump's just suing people left right. He sued the Des Moines Register over having their poll be wrong. I should have been suing the Des Moines Register over that, because I had egg on my face publishing that story. But anyway, that is neither here nor there. So that what has been thrown out as Trump's legal onslaught against media institutions

continues. The real news that is worth digging in on is the latest regarding this Wall Street Journal story. So here's the official news. It's just come across the wire. He filed the lawsuit on Friday against Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch himself, and two Wall Street Journal reporters. He's raising claims under federal libel law, a court record show. Interestingly, this was filed in the federal court for the Southern District of Florida. Does that ring a bell to anybody? The Southern District of Florida. Does that ring a bell to anybody? The Southern District of Florida?

Hmm, why might he be doing it there? Here's an idea. You know, Eileen Cannon, the judge that was making life as easy as possible for Donald Trump as he was being investigated and indicted for mishandling of classified information. Yeah, Southern District of Florida is Cannon's district. So obviously we're doing some judge shopping here. A little bit more from the latest is coming from CNBC. He writes, I look forward

to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his pile of garbage newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. That will be an interesting experience. That was a Trump to social post around this filing. And he went on to blah, blah, blah, deny, deny, deny that this is even true. Here's the thing about this story. It does not be above Trump to file completely ridiculous lawsuits against media companies, right? And we have the CBS 60 minutes situation, which is still happening, which is the most absurd law lawsuit that you could

possibly imagine. I mean, he's literally suing 60 minutes for editing the interview with Kamala Harris so that it fit into a 60 minute long show, which is right in the name. Like, the thing is absurd. And yet that moves forward. And that's moved forward enough that Shari Redstone is giving concessions to Donald Trump, paying him off millions. And apparently, you know, firing Stephen Colbert, how related that is, Stephen Colbert's show was losing money, but you can't report on the Stephen Colbert firing outside of the context of the fact that CBS has totally folded to Trump and paid him off over the stupidest

fucking lawsuit in history. So you can't really glean anything about whether Trump thinks the facts are on his side from the fact that he's filed a lawsuit because he's filed lawsuits where the facts aren't on his side all the damn time. In this case, I think it's important to revisit one of the facts from the story. You know, we're all, you know, getting our laughs and getting our, you know, conspiracy theories, our own theories riled up about Enigma and about the secrets, the wonderful secrets that Trump and Epstein have together. But to me, the interesting part of the Wall Street Journal story, besides the content of the birthday

card, was where the information was coming from. And I want to read from that, from the report one more time. Pages from the leather bound album, assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006, are among the documents examined by justice department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. This book was reviewed by the Justice Department. Again, JVL wrote about this in his newsletter.

If you're not subscribed to JVL's newsletter, what are you doing? Go to thebullock.com. It's the best newsletter in the business. He writes it every day, the triad. As he writes today, it's like, well, there are only a few options. This is totally faked and fabricated like either the Wall Street Journal did or that other people did. It's impossible to kind of say why would there be a burn book that was fabricated with other famous people in there? Les Wexner, Alan Dershowitz, none of them have denied it. If the book is real, but it's just Trump's that's not right, like Jolaine Maxwell that

Trump maintained a friendship with, was the one that organized all this. So, I'm sure it's possible that the Justice Department reviewed something in 2006 that was, that was fabricated. I mean, the Justice Department looks over stuff that isn't true at all. But for the Wall Street Journal, knowing how litigious this Trump is, to note in paragraph three that this was part of the evidence against Jeffrey Epstein in 2006 makes it a very, very, very steep hill to climb for Donald Trump. If he wants to convince anybody that this is a fake. So the lawsuit will go forth and Donald Trump only has a few plays in his playbook, rather. He's using them all.

The lie, the initial denial, denial, deny, deny, deny, deny. The lawsuit, the threats of lawsuits, the threats of intimidation. And then you move on to, well, was it really just locker room talk? You know, we did this in Access Hollywood, how they moved from That Isn't My Voice to Well, It's Just Boys Will Be Boys. So you can see if we see that same trajectory here. But in the meantime, Trump is going to take this to court. I don't know. I hope they get into court because it might be that the only way for us to truly know the extent of Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein would be for him to have to experience discovery on that very question. So, hope springs eternal on that front. When George Conway is back

for vacation, we'll get his optimistic take on that, as usual. And that is all we got for now. So the frivolous lawsuit against Bob Woodward that Trump has filed has been thrown out this afternoon and he's replaced that with a new frivolous lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch. If the worst thing that comes out of this is that Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump are fighting, you know, democracy has had worse days than that. So we'll continue to keep an eye on it. Subscribe to the feed, tell your friends, and we'll be seeing you back here soon.