President-elect Donald Trump threatened Monday to file a lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and famed Iowa pollster Ann Selzer,
whose final survey before the Nov. 5 election badly underestimated Trump's support in the state, which he won.
“In my opinion it was fraud and election interference," Trump claimed of the survey, according to the Associated Press.
The incoming president took questions from reporters Monday at Mar-a-Lago in Florida during his first news conference since winning election.
ABC News last week agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate assertion on the air that the Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. Instead, Trump had been found liable for sexual assaulting and defaming her.
Trump on Monday previewed future legal action he planned to take against the news media. “I'm not doing this because I want to, I'm doing this because I feel l have an obligation to,” he told reporters.
“I'm going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster, who got it right all the time and then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by three of four points,” Trump continued. “And it became the biggest story of all time, all over the world.”
Selzer announced last month that she would retire her polling operation, a decision she said she had made well before the election.
The pollster, whose sterling reputation took a hit when it missed the Trump-Harris result in Iowa by 17 points, said she
has seen nothing in the polling data that should have signaled the results were off.
“If you’re hoping that I had landed on exactly why things went wrong, I have not,” Selzer said Friday during recording of “Iowa Press” at Iowa PBS Studios in Johnston. “It does sort of awaken me in the middle of the night, and I think, ‘Well, maybe I should check this. This is something that would be very odd if it were to happen.’ But we’ve explored everything.”
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