'Fire and Fury' book with Steve Bannon & others' quotes that viciously attack USA President Trump; Trump furiously takes down Bannon; Trump lawyer's very strong legal threat to publisher and author
Michael Wolff's upcoming book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House", whose excerpts and an article adapted from the book, were published in various media outlets on 3rd Jan. 2018 and later, has set off a political firestorm in the USA.
The book excerpts have quotes of former White House senior advisor, Steve Bannon, and others from the Trump White House, which are harshly critical of USA President Mr. Donald J. Trump as well as some of his close advisors including some close relatives of Mr. Trump. The book author, Wolff, claims that he had free access to the Trump White House and says that he conducted more than 200 interviews (with Trump administration and Trump campaign people, I guess).
Mr. Donald Trump issued a very harshly critical statement against Mr. Steve Bannon. I felt it appropriate to share that as reported by CNN here: http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politics/trump-statement-steve-bannon/index.html
---- start White House statement of President Trump dated 3rd Jan. 2018 ------
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn't represent my base — he's only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.
---- end White House statement of President Trump dated 3rd Jan. 2018 ------
Mr. Trump's lawyers have also sent legal notices to Mr. Steve Bannon, Mr. Michael Wolff and the publisher of Mr. Wolff's book, Mr. Steve Rubin, President of Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Here's the letter to Wolff and Rubin dated 4th January 2018 which is signed by (one of) Mr. Trump's lawyer(s), CHARLES J. HARDER Of HARDER MIRELL & ABRAMS LLP: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4343617/Read-Trump-lawyer-s-letter-to-Michael-Wolff-and.pdf
Some excerpts from it are given below:
We are investigating numerous false and/or baseless statements that you have made about Mr. Trump in your upcoming book titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (the “Book”). A portion of these statements are contained in Mr. Wolff’s article published on New York magazine’s website titled “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President,” located at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01 /michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html (the “Article”). [Ravi: The additional space character in the above link/url breaks it. The corrected link is provided as article 1 towards the bottom of this post. end-Ravi] Moreover, various excerpts from the Book are published elsewhere.
Your publication of the false/baseless statements about Mr. Trump gives rise to, among other claims, defamation by libel, defamation by libel per se, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contractual relations, and inducement of breach of contract.
...
Statements in your Article and Book about Mr. Trump (based on excerpts of the Book that have been published thus far) give rise to claims for libel and libel per se on the bases described above. Remedies include substantial monetary damages and punitive damages. Straderv. Ashley, 61 A.D.3d 1244, 1248, 877 N.Y.S.2d 747, 751 (2009) (affirming jury’s award of punitive damages in connection with a defamation claim).
...
Actual Malice
Actual malice (reckless disregard for the truth) can be proven by the fact that the Book admits in the Introduction that it contains untrue statements. Moreover, the Book appears to cite to no sources for many of its most damaging statements about Mr. Trump. Also, many of your so-called “sources” have stated publicly that they never spoke to Mr. Wolff and/or never made the statements that are being attributed to them. Other alleged “sources” of statements about Mr. Trump are believed to have no personal knowledge of the facts upon which they are making statements or are known to be unreliable and/or strongly biased against Mr. Trump, or there are other obvious reasons to question their reliability, accuracy or claims to have knowledge of alleged facts upon which they are purporting to make statements.
Mr. Trump’s Demands
Mr. Trump hereby demands that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the Book, the Article, or any excerpts or summaries of either of them, to any person or entity, and that you issue a full and complete retraction and apology to my client as to all statements made about him in the Book and Article that lack competent evidentiary support.
Please also send immediately an electronic copy of the full text of the Book, in searchable form, and send via messenger a hard copy of the Book to my office address at the top of this letter, so that we can fully assess all of the statements in the Book.
Inducement of Breach of Mr. Bannon’s Written Agreement
Stephen K. Bannon’s communications with Mr. Wolff in connection with the Book violated several provisions of Mr. Bannon’s written agreement with Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. (the “Agreement”). Mr. Trump, his family members, and their businesses are express third-party beneficiaries of the Agreement. The Agreement contains express provisions preventing Mr. Bannon from:
- Disclosing any confidential information to anyone of or about Mr. Trump, or any of his family members, or any of their businesses, or the campaign;
- Communicating with any members of the print or electronic media about Mr. Trump, or any of his family members, or any of their businesses, or the campaign;
- Disparaging Mr. Trump, or any of his family members, or any of their businesses, or the campaign.
As reflected in the Article and excerpts from the Book, Mr. Bannon has breached each of these provisions by his communications with Mr. Wolff. Now that you are aware of these contractual provisions, and Mr. Bannon’s breaches thereof, any publication by you of information provided to you from Mr. Bannon (including quotes from Mr. Bannon about Mr. Trump, or his family members, or their businesses, or the campaign) gives rise to claims of tortious interference with the Agreement, and inducement of Mr. Bannon to breach of the Agreement, among other claims.
Remedies include substantial monetary damages and punitive damages.
In the near future, you should expect to hear from this office in greater detail on all of the foregoing issues.
You are now on notice of the foregoing claims and therefore you are now under a legal duty to affirmatively preserve, and not delete, destroy, hide or misplace, all documents, communications and materials of all types, in both physical and electronic form, that refer to or relate to in any way to the Book and any/all of its contents, the Article and any/all of its contents, Mr. Trump, any/all of his family members, and/all of their businesses, and/or the Donald J. Trump for President campaign.
---- end first set of excerpts from legal notice sent by Mr. Trump's lawyers ----
Ravi: The letter also contains a demand for preservation of evidence which includes a huge list of material to be stored, with quotations from judgements where USA courts of law seem to have supported such demands for preservation of evidence. This part is of great interest to me as both a former and retired international software consultant and a current India-based social media writer (free service and not with commercial objectives). Here is a small extract from that part of the letter: "This demand requires that you affirmatively preserve, and not destroy, delete, hide or misplace, documents and materials of all kinds, including without limitation all electronic mail (email), letters, draft letters, facsimile transmissions, memoranda, draft memoranda, instant messages (IMs), text messages, chats, phone messages, phone logs, calendars, reports, handwritten notes, typewritten notes, charts and spreadsheets, articles, draft articles, photographs, still images, illustrations, video recordings, audio recordings, transcripts of video or audio recordings, among other types of documents and communications. This demand also requires that you affirmatively preserve all servers, backup tapes, hard drives and storage devices in your possession, custody or control and could contain any of the aforementioned documents and/or materials."
Ravi: If I were the IT manager for this publishing firm, I would have a stress attack/panic attack on reading this paragraph in the legal notice (ESI refers to Electronic Stored Information):
"Adequate preservation of ESI requires more than simply refraining from efforts to destroy or dispose of such evidence. You must also intervene to prevent loss due to routine operations and employ proper techniques and protocols suited to protection of ESI. Be advised that sources of ESI are altered and erased by continued use of your computers and other devices. Booting a drive, examining its contents or running any application will irretrievably alter the evidence it contains and may constitute unlawful spoliation of evidence. Consequently, alteration and erasure may result from your failure to act diligently and responsibly to prevent loss or corruption of ESI."
Ravi: And then there is some advice from Mr. Trump's lawyer to the publisher and author about how to preserve ESI!
"You should take affirmative steps to prevent anyone with access to your data, systems and archives from seeking to modify, destroy or hide electronic evidence on network or local hard drives (such as by deleting or overwriting files, using data shredding and overwriting applications, defragmentation, re-imaging or replacing drives, encryption, compression, steganography or the like). With respect to local hard drives, one way to protect existing data on local hard drives is by the creation and authentication of a forensically qualified image of all sectors of the drive. Such a forensically qualified duplicate may also be called a bitstream image or clone of the drive. Be advised that a conventional back up of a hard drive is not a forensically qualified image because it only captures active, unlocked data files and fails to preserve forensically significant data that may exist in such areas as unallocated space, slack space and the swap file.
With respect to the hard drives and storage devices of each of the persons with sufficient knowledge or information about this dispute, as well as each other person likely to have information pertaining to the dispute on their computer hard drive(s), demand is made that you immediately obtain, authenticate and preserve forensically qualified images of the hard drives in any computer system (including portable and home computers) used by that person during the period from January 1, 2015 through the present, as well as recording and preserving the system time and date of each such computer.
Once obtained, each such forensically qualified image should be labeled to identify the date of acquisition, the person or entity acquiring the image and the system and medium from which it was obtained. Each such image should be preserved without alteration."
Ravi: And then there is an offer of discussion on preservation protocols!
"Preservation Protocols
We are desirous of working with you to agree upon an acceptable protocol for forensically sound preservation and can supply a suitable protocol, if you will furnish an inventory of the systems and media to be preserved. Otherwise, if you will promptly disclose the preservation protocol you intend to employ, perhaps we can identify any points of disagreement and resolve them. A successful and compliant ESI preservation effort requires expertise. If you do not currently have such expertise at your disposal, we urge you to engage the services of an expert in electronic evidence and computer forensics. Perhaps our respective experts can work cooperatively to secure a balance between evidence preservation and burden that is fair to both sides and acceptable to the trier of fact."
Ravi: That is then followed by a demand for a quick response in writing! My God! How terrifying! I mean, it is from an attorney of the current President of the USA, even though the attorney is a private attorney and not a USA govt. attorney from the White House or the Department of Justice!
"Confirmation of Compliance
Please confirm to us in writing by no later than January 5, 2018, that you will comply with the foregoing instructions and have taken the steps outlined in this document to preserve ESI and tangible documents potentially relevant to this dispute. If you have not undertaken the steps outlined above, or have taken other actions, please describe what you have done to preserve potentially relevant evidence."
Ravi: My God! What a huge administrative burden it would be for the publisher and the author if they really had to satisfy the above demands in full. I guess the publisher and author's legal team would be able to advise them on the minimum that they need to do in this matter. Hmm.
http://variety.com/2018/politics/news/trump-fire-and-fury-michael-wolff-1202653724/ reports that the publisher plans to release the book and is not deterred by this legal threat. In fact, they have advanced the release of the book to 5th Jan. 2018 (today)! The article reports the publisher company's statement as "Henry Holt confirms that we received a cease and desist letter from an attorney for President Trump".."We see ‘Fire and Fury’ as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse, and are proceeding with the publication of the book."
The article also mentions this tweet of the author, Michael Wolff, "Here we go. You can buy it (and read it) tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. President.",
https://twitter.com/MichaelWolffNYC/status/949023092357128194, dated 4th Jan. 2018.
So the publisher and the author did not get scared by Trump's lawyer's very threatening letter! Hmm.
The publisher and author may sell a huge number of copies of this book and thereby make a lot of money from it, and become very famous not only in USA but in some other parts of the world as well. However, they perhaps will have to use a good part of the money earned from the book sales for their legal defense against Mr. Trump's lawsuit(s).
One of the most terrifying things in today's world, in especially litigious societies like USA but also in developing countries like India, for educated white-collar middle class people and perhaps even somewhat rich people, is being targeted by a billionaire using very knowledgeable and very capable legal firms. Not only can the law deliver justice, but the billionaire can use, for a payment of course, such legal firms to use the law to, frankly, financially ruin and destroy such people and their businesses. Now I must say here that Mr. Trump has reacted to a very, very vicious attack on him in these published book excerpts and to the very probable case that the upcoming book has many more such very, very vicious attacks on him. So Mr. Trump, in my considered opinion, is morally justified in seeking to protect his fair name and reputation from these and similar future such attacks, using the legal avenues available to him in the USA.
About the offensive to Mr. Trump articles including the Michael Wolff article in the New Yorker, my view is that I don't want to believe that their very vicious criticisms of Mr. Trump are true. I would like to have the view that Trump's intentions are to do good for the USA, even if he, as some argue, may not have the governance ability to know which policies will be good and which will be bad. I would like to have the view that candidate Trump wanted to be President Trump and try to do good for the USA.
I guess, as of now at least, I am simply not in a position to imagine that Trump actually wanted to lose the election but win from a business point of view due to the worldwide brand/image building impact that his presidential campaign resulted in, which is what Mr. Michael Wolff alleges in the excerpts of the book that have been referred above. [Note that links to articles giving these excerpts are provided below.] I mean, my mind is not willing to accept the possibility that Trump ran for President mainly as an image promotion exercise which he could convert to big money after losing the election, and that he ****never wanted**** to win the 2016 presidential election.
I just can't handle accepting Catch-22 book like desperately cynical scenarios about the person occupying the most powerful position, militarily and economy-wise, in the world today, which is that of the President of the USA, who is also the Commander-In-Chief of the ***mighty*** armed forces of the USA.
Articles related to the matter:
1) This article is "adapted from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, published this month by Henry Holt & Co.": "Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President" by Michael Wolff, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html, 3rd Jan 2018. Note that the above article author is the same as the "Fire and Fury" book author and this is the article referenced in above extracts of Mr. Trump's lawyer's letter to the publisher and author of the book.
2) Trump Bannon row: 11 explosive claims from new book, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42559436, 4th Jan. 2018
3) Despite Takedown And Legal Threat, Bannon Says He Still Backs Trump, https://www.npr.org/2018/01/04/575605000/despite-takedown-and-legal-threat-bannon-says-he-still-backs-trump, 4th Jan. 2018
4) Trump Bannon row: White House lawyers threaten former aide, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42563443, 4th Jan. 2018
5) Bannon: 2016 Trump Tower meeting was 'treasonous', http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politics/bannon-wolff-fire-and-fury/index.html, 4th Jan. 2018
6) Donald Trump targets book, threatens ex-ally Steve Bannon with legal action, http://indianexpress.com/article/world/donald-trump-targets-fire-and-fury-book-threatens-ex-ally-steve-bannon-with-legal-action-5012362/, 5th Jan 2018
Please note that I have a PUBLICLY NEUTRAL informal-student-observer role in these posts that I put up about USA politics. Of course, as I am an Indian citizen living in India, there is no question of me having voted in USA elections.
[I thank Mr. Donald J. Trump (and CNN.com for Mr. Trump's statement), CHARLES J. HARDER Of HARDER MIRELL & ABRAMS LLP and Henry Holt & Co. (and variety.com for Henry Holt & Co. statement), and have presumed that they will not have any objections to me sharing the above extracts from their website/legal notice on this post which is freely viewable by all, and does not have any financial profit motive whatsoever.]
The book excerpts have quotes of former White House senior advisor, Steve Bannon, and others from the Trump White House, which are harshly critical of USA President Mr. Donald J. Trump as well as some of his close advisors including some close relatives of Mr. Trump. The book author, Wolff, claims that he had free access to the Trump White House and says that he conducted more than 200 interviews (with Trump administration and Trump campaign people, I guess).
Mr. Donald Trump issued a very harshly critical statement against Mr. Steve Bannon. I felt it appropriate to share that as reported by CNN here: http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politics/trump-statement-steve-bannon/index.html
---- start White House statement of President Trump dated 3rd Jan. 2018 ------
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn't represent my base — he's only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.
---- end White House statement of President Trump dated 3rd Jan. 2018 ------
Mr. Trump's lawyers have also sent legal notices to Mr. Steve Bannon, Mr. Michael Wolff and the publisher of Mr. Wolff's book, Mr. Steve Rubin, President of Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Here's the letter to Wolff and Rubin dated 4th January 2018 which is signed by (one of) Mr. Trump's lawyer(s), CHARLES J. HARDER Of HARDER MIRELL & ABRAMS LLP: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4343617/Read-Trump-lawyer-s-letter-to-Michael-Wolff-and.pdf
Some excerpts from it are given below:
We are investigating numerous false and/or baseless statements that you have made about Mr. Trump in your upcoming book titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (the “Book”). A portion of these statements are contained in Mr. Wolff’s article published on New York magazine’s website titled “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President,” located at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01 /michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html (the “Article”). [Ravi: The additional space character in the above link/url breaks it. The corrected link is provided as article 1 towards the bottom of this post. end-Ravi] Moreover, various excerpts from the Book are published elsewhere.
Your publication of the false/baseless statements about Mr. Trump gives rise to, among other claims, defamation by libel, defamation by libel per se, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contractual relations, and inducement of breach of contract.
...
Statements in your Article and Book about Mr. Trump (based on excerpts of the Book that have been published thus far) give rise to claims for libel and libel per se on the bases described above. Remedies include substantial monetary damages and punitive damages. Straderv. Ashley, 61 A.D.3d 1244, 1248, 877 N.Y.S.2d 747, 751 (2009) (affirming jury’s award of punitive damages in connection with a defamation claim).
...
Actual Malice
Actual malice (reckless disregard for the truth) can be proven by the fact that the Book admits in the Introduction that it contains untrue statements. Moreover, the Book appears to cite to no sources for many of its most damaging statements about Mr. Trump. Also, many of your so-called “sources” have stated publicly that they never spoke to Mr. Wolff and/or never made the statements that are being attributed to them. Other alleged “sources” of statements about Mr. Trump are believed to have no personal knowledge of the facts upon which they are making statements or are known to be unreliable and/or strongly biased against Mr. Trump, or there are other obvious reasons to question their reliability, accuracy or claims to have knowledge of alleged facts upon which they are purporting to make statements.
Mr. Trump’s Demands
Mr. Trump hereby demands that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the Book, the Article, or any excerpts or summaries of either of them, to any person or entity, and that you issue a full and complete retraction and apology to my client as to all statements made about him in the Book and Article that lack competent evidentiary support.
Please also send immediately an electronic copy of the full text of the Book, in searchable form, and send via messenger a hard copy of the Book to my office address at the top of this letter, so that we can fully assess all of the statements in the Book.
Inducement of Breach of Mr. Bannon’s Written Agreement
Stephen K. Bannon’s communications with Mr. Wolff in connection with the Book violated several provisions of Mr. Bannon’s written agreement with Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. (the “Agreement”). Mr. Trump, his family members, and their businesses are express third-party beneficiaries of the Agreement. The Agreement contains express provisions preventing Mr. Bannon from:
- Disclosing any confidential information to anyone of or about Mr. Trump, or any of his family members, or any of their businesses, or the campaign;
- Communicating with any members of the print or electronic media about Mr. Trump, or any of his family members, or any of their businesses, or the campaign;
- Disparaging Mr. Trump, or any of his family members, or any of their businesses, or the campaign.
As reflected in the Article and excerpts from the Book, Mr. Bannon has breached each of these provisions by his communications with Mr. Wolff. Now that you are aware of these contractual provisions, and Mr. Bannon’s breaches thereof, any publication by you of information provided to you from Mr. Bannon (including quotes from Mr. Bannon about Mr. Trump, or his family members, or their businesses, or the campaign) gives rise to claims of tortious interference with the Agreement, and inducement of Mr. Bannon to breach of the Agreement, among other claims.
Remedies include substantial monetary damages and punitive damages.
In the near future, you should expect to hear from this office in greater detail on all of the foregoing issues.
You are now on notice of the foregoing claims and therefore you are now under a legal duty to affirmatively preserve, and not delete, destroy, hide or misplace, all documents, communications and materials of all types, in both physical and electronic form, that refer to or relate to in any way to the Book and any/all of its contents, the Article and any/all of its contents, Mr. Trump, any/all of his family members, and/all of their businesses, and/or the Donald J. Trump for President campaign.
---- end first set of excerpts from legal notice sent by Mr. Trump's lawyers ----
Ravi: The letter also contains a demand for preservation of evidence which includes a huge list of material to be stored, with quotations from judgements where USA courts of law seem to have supported such demands for preservation of evidence. This part is of great interest to me as both a former and retired international software consultant and a current India-based social media writer (free service and not with commercial objectives). Here is a small extract from that part of the letter: "This demand requires that you affirmatively preserve, and not destroy, delete, hide or misplace, documents and materials of all kinds, including without limitation all electronic mail (email), letters, draft letters, facsimile transmissions, memoranda, draft memoranda, instant messages (IMs), text messages, chats, phone messages, phone logs, calendars, reports, handwritten notes, typewritten notes, charts and spreadsheets, articles, draft articles, photographs, still images, illustrations, video recordings, audio recordings, transcripts of video or audio recordings, among other types of documents and communications. This demand also requires that you affirmatively preserve all servers, backup tapes, hard drives and storage devices in your possession, custody or control and could contain any of the aforementioned documents and/or materials."
Ravi: If I were the IT manager for this publishing firm, I would have a stress attack/panic attack on reading this paragraph in the legal notice (ESI refers to Electronic Stored Information):
"Adequate preservation of ESI requires more than simply refraining from efforts to destroy or dispose of such evidence. You must also intervene to prevent loss due to routine operations and employ proper techniques and protocols suited to protection of ESI. Be advised that sources of ESI are altered and erased by continued use of your computers and other devices. Booting a drive, examining its contents or running any application will irretrievably alter the evidence it contains and may constitute unlawful spoliation of evidence. Consequently, alteration and erasure may result from your failure to act diligently and responsibly to prevent loss or corruption of ESI."
Ravi: And then there is some advice from Mr. Trump's lawyer to the publisher and author about how to preserve ESI!
"You should take affirmative steps to prevent anyone with access to your data, systems and archives from seeking to modify, destroy or hide electronic evidence on network or local hard drives (such as by deleting or overwriting files, using data shredding and overwriting applications, defragmentation, re-imaging or replacing drives, encryption, compression, steganography or the like). With respect to local hard drives, one way to protect existing data on local hard drives is by the creation and authentication of a forensically qualified image of all sectors of the drive. Such a forensically qualified duplicate may also be called a bitstream image or clone of the drive. Be advised that a conventional back up of a hard drive is not a forensically qualified image because it only captures active, unlocked data files and fails to preserve forensically significant data that may exist in such areas as unallocated space, slack space and the swap file.
With respect to the hard drives and storage devices of each of the persons with sufficient knowledge or information about this dispute, as well as each other person likely to have information pertaining to the dispute on their computer hard drive(s), demand is made that you immediately obtain, authenticate and preserve forensically qualified images of the hard drives in any computer system (including portable and home computers) used by that person during the period from January 1, 2015 through the present, as well as recording and preserving the system time and date of each such computer.
Once obtained, each such forensically qualified image should be labeled to identify the date of acquisition, the person or entity acquiring the image and the system and medium from which it was obtained. Each such image should be preserved without alteration."
Ravi: And then there is an offer of discussion on preservation protocols!
"Preservation Protocols
We are desirous of working with you to agree upon an acceptable protocol for forensically sound preservation and can supply a suitable protocol, if you will furnish an inventory of the systems and media to be preserved. Otherwise, if you will promptly disclose the preservation protocol you intend to employ, perhaps we can identify any points of disagreement and resolve them. A successful and compliant ESI preservation effort requires expertise. If you do not currently have such expertise at your disposal, we urge you to engage the services of an expert in electronic evidence and computer forensics. Perhaps our respective experts can work cooperatively to secure a balance between evidence preservation and burden that is fair to both sides and acceptable to the trier of fact."
Ravi: That is then followed by a demand for a quick response in writing! My God! How terrifying! I mean, it is from an attorney of the current President of the USA, even though the attorney is a private attorney and not a USA govt. attorney from the White House or the Department of Justice!
"Confirmation of Compliance
Please confirm to us in writing by no later than January 5, 2018, that you will comply with the foregoing instructions and have taken the steps outlined in this document to preserve ESI and tangible documents potentially relevant to this dispute. If you have not undertaken the steps outlined above, or have taken other actions, please describe what you have done to preserve potentially relevant evidence."
Ravi: My God! What a huge administrative burden it would be for the publisher and the author if they really had to satisfy the above demands in full. I guess the publisher and author's legal team would be able to advise them on the minimum that they need to do in this matter. Hmm.
http://variety.com/2018/politics/news/trump-fire-and-fury-michael-wolff-1202653724/ reports that the publisher plans to release the book and is not deterred by this legal threat. In fact, they have advanced the release of the book to 5th Jan. 2018 (today)! The article reports the publisher company's statement as "Henry Holt confirms that we received a cease and desist letter from an attorney for President Trump".."We see ‘Fire and Fury’ as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse, and are proceeding with the publication of the book."
The article also mentions this tweet of the author, Michael Wolff, "Here we go. You can buy it (and read it) tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. President.",
https://twitter.com/MichaelWolffNYC/status/949023092357128194, dated 4th Jan. 2018.
So the publisher and the author did not get scared by Trump's lawyer's very threatening letter! Hmm.
The publisher and author may sell a huge number of copies of this book and thereby make a lot of money from it, and become very famous not only in USA but in some other parts of the world as well. However, they perhaps will have to use a good part of the money earned from the book sales for their legal defense against Mr. Trump's lawsuit(s).
One of the most terrifying things in today's world, in especially litigious societies like USA but also in developing countries like India, for educated white-collar middle class people and perhaps even somewhat rich people, is being targeted by a billionaire using very knowledgeable and very capable legal firms. Not only can the law deliver justice, but the billionaire can use, for a payment of course, such legal firms to use the law to, frankly, financially ruin and destroy such people and their businesses. Now I must say here that Mr. Trump has reacted to a very, very vicious attack on him in these published book excerpts and to the very probable case that the upcoming book has many more such very, very vicious attacks on him. So Mr. Trump, in my considered opinion, is morally justified in seeking to protect his fair name and reputation from these and similar future such attacks, using the legal avenues available to him in the USA.
About the offensive to Mr. Trump articles including the Michael Wolff article in the New Yorker, my view is that I don't want to believe that their very vicious criticisms of Mr. Trump are true. I would like to have the view that Trump's intentions are to do good for the USA, even if he, as some argue, may not have the governance ability to know which policies will be good and which will be bad. I would like to have the view that candidate Trump wanted to be President Trump and try to do good for the USA.
I guess, as of now at least, I am simply not in a position to imagine that Trump actually wanted to lose the election but win from a business point of view due to the worldwide brand/image building impact that his presidential campaign resulted in, which is what Mr. Michael Wolff alleges in the excerpts of the book that have been referred above. [Note that links to articles giving these excerpts are provided below.] I mean, my mind is not willing to accept the possibility that Trump ran for President mainly as an image promotion exercise which he could convert to big money after losing the election, and that he ****never wanted**** to win the 2016 presidential election.
I just can't handle accepting Catch-22 book like desperately cynical scenarios about the person occupying the most powerful position, militarily and economy-wise, in the world today, which is that of the President of the USA, who is also the Commander-In-Chief of the ***mighty*** armed forces of the USA.
Articles related to the matter:
1) This article is "adapted from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, published this month by Henry Holt & Co.": "Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President" by Michael Wolff, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html, 3rd Jan 2018. Note that the above article author is the same as the "Fire and Fury" book author and this is the article referenced in above extracts of Mr. Trump's lawyer's letter to the publisher and author of the book.
2) Trump Bannon row: 11 explosive claims from new book, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42559436, 4th Jan. 2018
3) Despite Takedown And Legal Threat, Bannon Says He Still Backs Trump, https://www.npr.org/2018/01/04/575605000/despite-takedown-and-legal-threat-bannon-says-he-still-backs-trump, 4th Jan. 2018
4) Trump Bannon row: White House lawyers threaten former aide, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42563443, 4th Jan. 2018
5) Bannon: 2016 Trump Tower meeting was 'treasonous', http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politics/bannon-wolff-fire-and-fury/index.html, 4th Jan. 2018
6) Donald Trump targets book, threatens ex-ally Steve Bannon with legal action, http://indianexpress.com/article/world/donald-trump-targets-fire-and-fury-book-threatens-ex-ally-steve-bannon-with-legal-action-5012362/, 5th Jan 2018
Please note that I have a PUBLICLY NEUTRAL informal-student-observer role in these posts that I put up about USA politics. Of course, as I am an Indian citizen living in India, there is no question of me having voted in USA elections.
[I thank Mr. Donald J. Trump (and CNN.com for Mr. Trump's statement), CHARLES J. HARDER Of HARDER MIRELL & ABRAMS LLP and Henry Holt & Co. (and variety.com for Henry Holt & Co. statement), and have presumed that they will not have any objections to me sharing the above extracts from their website/legal notice on this post which is freely viewable by all, and does not have any financial profit motive whatsoever.]
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