The US president-elect’s lawsuit comes days after a defamation settlement was reached with ABC News.

US President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit accusing a newspaper and a polling company of engaging in “blatant election interference” by publishing a pre-election survey. underestimated his popularity.

The lawsuit filed late Monday accuses The Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett and pollster Ann Selzer of deliberately downplaying Trump’s approval rating in a poll that showed Trump Trump trails Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

A Nov. 2 poll showed Harris leading by 3 percentage points in Iowa, a Midwestern state that Trump easily carried in the 2016 and 2020 elections, drawing widespread attention.

Trump won Iowa by more than 13 points in last month’s presidential election.

“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not a stunning coincidence but intentional,” the lawsuit filed in Polk County, Iowa, claims. “As President Trump said: ‘She clearly Know what you’re doing.'”

The lawsuit, based on claims based on alleged violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, seeks treble the damages determined by the jury.

Des Moines Register spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton said the newspaper stood by its reporting and believed the lawsuit was without merit.

“We acknowledge that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect President Trump’s ultimate margin of victory on Election Day in Iowa as the poll’s full demographic, cross-sectional Tables, weighted and unweighted data, and technical data explained by pollster Ann Seltzer,” said Anton.

Selzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told PBS in an interview last week that she was confused as to why anyone would think she designed the poll to produce a specific result.

Trump’s lawsuit comes days later ABC News agrees to settlement He filed a defamation case rejecting anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate claim that he was found civilly liable for rape.

Civil liberties group the Foundation for Personal Rights and Expression condemned the lawsuit as a “direct attack” on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to free speech.

“Every media organization’s First Amendment rights are at stake if newspapers and polling companies are sued for ‘deceptive conduct’ for publishing stories and polls that politicians don’t like. Poll errors are not election interference or Fraud,” the group said.

Trump, he too Sue CBS News Harris, who claims his interview was deceptively edited, faces significant legal hurdles in his lawsuit because the United States has some of the strongest speech protections in the world.

Still, the lawsuits could create difficulties for news organizations by exposing potentially embarrassing internal communications and exposing reporters and executives to depositions.