Judge rejects Donald Trump’s bid to dismiss a Delco election worker’s defamation lawsuit

Philadelphia will remain on the long roster of legal venues where Donald Trump has failed to convince a judge that his job as president in 2020 gives him immunity from lawsuits now.

Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Erdos this week rejected a request from Trump and his presidential campaign to dismiss a defamation case filed in 2021 by James Savage, a Delaware County voting machine supervisor who accuses Trump of pushing unsubstantiated claims that he tampered with the 2020 election results.

» READ MORE: A Delco election worker’s lawsuit says Trump’s false rhetoric about stolen votes led to threats and gave him two heart attacks

Savage said remarks from Trump and his attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and two Delaware County Republican poll watchers made him a target for hatred, ridicule, and physical threats.

Savage also sued Giuliani and the poll watchers.

Erdos based his ruling an October 2022 letter Trump, who was no longer president, sent to the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s letter included his Delco allegations in a litany of debunked election fraud claims.

The judge said he will rule soon on Trump’s claim of immunity in two other instances — his phone-in testimony during a state Senate committee hearing in Gettysburg three weeks after the 2020 election and a tweet from Trump two days later. Trump mentioned the Delco claims in both.

This is a fight Trump has lost twice already.

» READ MORE: ‘POTUS just called me’: Pa. GOP emails shed new light on 2020 election upheaval

A federal judge in Washington D.C. last year ruled that Trump does not have presidential immunity in several lawsuits that accuse him of causing the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Another federal judge in New York ruled two weeks ago that Trump has no immunity for comments he made in 2019 about the writer E. Jean Carroll, who had accused him of sexual assault.

A jury in a separate federal lawsuit in May backed Carroll’s claim of sexual assault, awarding her a $5 million judgement.

Michael Madaio, Trump’s attorney, argued Tuesday in Philadelphia that Trump relied on sworn statements from the Delco poll watchers and never mentioned Savage by name.

J. Connor Corcoran, Savage’s attorney, noted that Trump’s lies about the 2020 election had been rejected in more than 60 court cases.

“This was gross speculation that was manufactured to create chaos,” Corcoran said of Trump’s Delco claims. “In this case, it was successful.”

Trump faces a long docket of court cases — including a federal indictment for keeping sensitive government documents after leaving office and a New York criminal case for allegedly paying hush money to keep an affair quiet during his 2016 campaign, plus a New York civil case that accuses him and his company of financial fraud.

Clout told you in May that Bruce Castor, the former Montgomery County district attorney and county commissioner who represented Trump during his second impeachment trial, had asked a judge to let him stop representing Giuliani in Savage’s lawsuit.

Castor’s reason: “He’s not cooperating, and he’s not paying me.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani disputed that, contending that Castor was just trying to “suck up to the anti-Trump legal community,”

A judge approved Castor’s request last month.

Corcoran said Giuliani advised that he will now represent himself in the case. Giuliani did not respond to Clout’s request for comment.

Giuliani’s legal career has been on a crash-and-burn trajectory since he hitched it to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

His license to practice law was suspended in New York in June 2021 for lies he told in Pennsylvania about that election.

And a three-panel disciplinary committee for the District of Columbia’s Bar Association last week recommended that Giuliani should be disbarred, also for his actions in Pennsylvania in 2020.

U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, a Philadelphia Democrat tight with President Joe Biden, pushed back after a journalist for England’s The Independent shared a story on Twitter Tuesday about an “awkward moment” when Biden chatted with a soldier during a review with King Charles III.

“Not awkward at all. One of these two is the the most powerful person in the world. The other is the constitutional monarch of a middle power. The UK was quite fortune to have a visit from the most powerful person in the world,” Boyle tweeted in response.

That prompted several Irish attaboy replies, plenty of references to who won the Revolutionary War (not England) and some very British-ly rigid complaints about royal protocol.

If anything, the new king came off as peevish in the story, being snippy while Biden was just trying to talk to a guy.

Boyle told Clout he wasn’t trying to pick a fight when calling the country known to have a “special relationship” with America a middle power.

“It’s not an insult,” Boyle said. “I value the U.K. as an ally. It’s just a reflection of reality. It’s not 1880 anymore. Some in the very rightwing elements of the British press are living in the past.”

Clout provides often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.