President Trump is threatening to sue a left-leaning think tank for $5 billion after it published a report claiming his National Guard deployments had no measurable effect on violent crime, and the organization is refusing to back down.
Trump's personal attorney Alejandro Brito sent a nine-page cease-and-desist letter to the Center for American Progress demanding the group retract its July 13 report, issue a public apology, and provide financial compensation by 5 p.m. on a Friday deadline, or face a massive defamation suit. The think tank, founded by John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, has flatly refused. Its president, Neera Tanden, who also worked in the Clinton administration, called the threat an attempt to silence the organization and vowed not to yield.
The dispute centers on a CAP report authored in part by Chandler Hall, the group's associate director of public safety, which concluded that National Guard deployments to 11 American cities, including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Memphis, produced "no measurable effect on violent crime trends" once preexisting declines were factored in. Trump, in a Truth Social post, called the report "just another Radical Left SCAM" and said a lawsuit was "being drawn now."
The CAP report acknowledged that the 11 cities where the National Guard was deployed or threatened saw a 14 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling violent crime rate and a 22 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling murder rate from June 2024 to June 2025. But the think tank argued those declines predated the deployments and began in 2023 and 2024, before the National Guard was first sent to Los Angeles.
CAP framed the administration's claims as exploiting a trend it did not create:
"The second Trump administration is trying to take credit for the historic drop in violent crime across America despite the fact that this trend began before it took office, and it is using these declines to justify expanding policies that are unpopular, ineffective, and costly."
Trump sees it differently. His administration points to results on the ground, particularly in Washington, D.C., where the Metropolitan Police Department was placed under direct federal control. Breitbart reporter Hannah Knudsen reported in August 2025 that overall violent crime in the capital dropped 22 percent in the week after Trump announced his crackdown, with zero murders recorded over a seven-day stretch.
The Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force has made more than 16,000 arrests in Washington since last August, the Washington Examiner reported, citing U.S. Marshals Service figures. Roughly 4,600 National Guard troops remain stationed in the capital and are set to stay through the next presidential inauguration in 2029, a commitment that alone could cost taxpayers at least $1.4 billion in additional expenses.
Beyond questioning the Guard's effect on crime, CAP estimated the deployments could cost American taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if extended through the end of 2026. Hall, in remarks to the press, said it was "unfortunate that the president is continuing to still choose to boast that these deployments, these very costly interventions, are showing any result."
That cost figure is real, and taxpayers deserve a clear accounting. But cost and effectiveness are two different questions. CAP bundled them together in a way that let the headline, "no evidence" the Guard reduced crime, do the political work, while the fine print conceded double-digit drops in both violent crime and murder across the very cities in question. Whether those drops would have happened without 4,600 troops on the streets of Washington is a legitimate empirical debate. Packaging that debate as a flat declaration of failure is something else entirely.
Brito's nine-page letter argued that CAP did not simply reach a different scholarly conclusion. Newsmax reported that the attorney accused the think tank of turning a "disputed empirical issue" into a "false, malicious and defamatory accusation" against the president. Trump also signaled he was "strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization" to the suit.
On Truth Social, Trump named the donors he had in mind: George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. He also flagged foreign funding from the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.
Naming corporate and foreign donors publicly ratchets up the pressure well beyond a standard legal threat. Whether any of those entities face genuine legal exposure is an open question, no lawsuit has been formally filed as of the article's publication, but the signal to boardrooms and foreign missions is unmistakable: fund groups that publish reports the administration considers defamatory, and you may find your name in a federal complaint.
CAP's general counsel, Kevin Metz, responded bluntly. "The defamation allegation is utterly absurd: truth is not and cannot be defamation," he said. Tanden, the organization's president and CEO, issued a public statement, as AP News reported:
"This is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it."
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, a civil liberties organization, also weighed in. Aaron Terr, FIRE's director of public advocacy, told the Washington Examiner that threatening nonprofit donors "sends a chilling message: Fund an organization that criticizes me, and you'll be sued too. That's wholly incompatible with a free society."
First Amendment experts cited by AP characterized the threat as a pressure tactic rather than a legally viable defamation claim. Defamation suits brought by public officials face an extraordinarily high bar, the plaintiff must prove actual malice, meaning the defendant published false statements knowing they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth. Applying that standard to a think tank's policy analysis, even a tendentious one, is a steep climb.
The CAP threat fits a broader pattern during Trump's second term of using litigation, or the threat of it, against media organizations and critics. Just The News noted that CAP has deep ties to the Clinton political network, a lineage that makes the organization an inviting political target for the administration but does not, by itself, establish that its research is defamatory.
Trump had previously shared the same post on August 10 via Truth Social, suggesting the dispute had been simmering for weeks before the formal cease-and-desist letter landed. CAP has shown no sign of backing down, and the deadline passed without a retraction.
Several questions remain unanswered. No lawsuit has been filed in any court. No cause of action has been publicly specified beyond the broad label of defamation. And the question of whether the National Guard actually accelerated crime declines that were already underway, or merely coincided with them, remains genuinely unresolved. CAP's report does not settle it. Neither does the administration's insistence that the Guard deserves full credit.
What is clear is that a well-funded progressive think tank published a report timed to undercut one of the administration's signature public-safety initiatives, and the administration responded not with a competing study but with a $5 billion legal threat. Both sides chose the weapon that suited their institutional strengths, CAP reached for a policy paper, and the White House reached for a lawyer.
Taxpayers watching 4,600 troops patrol their capital might prefer that someone, somewhere, just answer the straightforward question: did it work?
