Noah Feldman, Columnist

Barr’s Ploy to Protect Trump Is Blatantly Wrong

When the president called E. Jean Carroll a liar, he wasn’t acting in his official capacity.

September 9, 2020 at 4:55 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Suing Trump personally.
Photographer: Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Glamour

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The news that Justice Department lawyers are taking over the defense of Donald Trump against a lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her in the 1980s, is even worse than it sounds.

On the face of it, it’s outrageous that government lawyers should expend taxpayer dollars to defend Trump against charges that he defamed Carroll by saying he had never met her and that she is a liar.