Bravo!

By Mary Papenfuss

“Peddle your scare tactics elsewhere. The Lincoln Project will not be intimidated by such empty bluster,” attorney Matthew Sanderson blasts in letter.

An attorney for the never-Trumper Lincoln Project sent a scathing legal response Saturday to a lawsuit threat over a pair of attack ads against Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner on billboards in Times Square.

The billboards skewer Donald Trump’s and -in-law for their callous indifference to the COVID-19 death toll in America, that now stands at nearly 225,000.

The Lincoln Project received a letter Friday from lawyer Marc Kasowitz, representing the House senior advisers, demanding that the “false, malicious and defamatory” ads be removed or “we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages.”

The responding missive from Lincoln Project attorney Matthew Sanderson fired back: “Please peddle your scare tactics elsewhere. The Lincoln Project will not be intimidated by such empty bluster.”

Sanderson added: “Your clients are no longer Upper East Side socialites, able to sue at the slightest offense to their personal sensitivities.” They are “public officials” due to a “gross act of nepotism” when Ivanka’s dad made them both House advisers.

Americans “have the right to discuss and criticize their public officials freely,” Sanderson schools Kasowitz, citing a Supreme Court ruling defending even “vehement, caustic and ... unpleasantly sharp attacks” of government officials.

In addition, the attack ads are entirely accurate,” Sanderson noted. Kasowitz had claimed that Kushner never said, as the billboard notes, that it’s “their problem” that New Yorkers are suffering from COVID-19.

Vanity Fair reported in September that Kushner had complained that New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo didn’t plead hard enough with the House to get coronavirus protective gear for his state. “His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem,” Kushner is quoted as saying in the article.