STORY: A federal judge on Monday dismissed Donald Trump's defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal.
The decision is a setback for the U.S. president in his legal campaign against media companies he accuses of treating him unfairly, as Trump has also sued the New York Times, the BBC, ABC and CBS.
Trump's lawsuit said the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper tarnished his reputation with an article describing a birthday card to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump's signature.
Trump and his lawyers said the card is fake, even after it was released by lawmakers investigating Epstein's case.
The judge said in tossing the case that Trump had not come close to meeting the "actual malice" standard that public figures must clear in defamation.
That means they must prove not only that a public statement about them was false but also that the media outlet or person who made the statement knew or should have known that it was false.
Reuters reporter Luc Cohen covered the decision.
"The judge went through the Wall Street Journal story and said, 'Look, they reached out to Trump for comment.
He denied it, and they printed that denial. And they also reached out to the Justice Department for comment and didn't get a response.' And so the judge said that shows investigative effort that and the fact that they printed Trump's denial shows that they were giving the reader the chance to draw their own conclusions. And the judge said that just does not comport with actual malice."
The judge said Trump could file an amended version of the lawsuit by April 27.
Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform that he would re-file the lawsuit by that date.
A spokesperson for Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal's parent company, said in a statement: "We are pleased with the judge's decision to dismiss this complaint. We stand behind the reliability, rigor and accuracy of The Wall Street Journal's reporting."
