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ABOVE THE LAW

Trump’s Lawyers Go To Iowa To Learn How To CivPro

Oops.

By Liz Dye and Andrew Torrez on July 01, 2025

Donald Trump’s lawyer Edward “Sideshow Bob” Paltzik is gonna learn him some civil procedure if he has to step on every rake in Iowa. And he might!

His adventures began in December of 2024, when he and local counsel Alan Ostergren filed a trollsuit in Polk County District Court against pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for aggravated getting a poll wrong. The case was premised on the theory that the “poll” was actually a super-secret conspiracy by Selzer, the Des Moines Register, and the Register’s parent company Gannett to defraud Iowa “consumers” by supplying defective “merchandise” in violation of Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.

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By James Pittman, JD, Co-Founder of 8am DocketWise

But perhaps the president’s sparklemagic counsel should have spent less time on their whizbang theory and more time hiring a process server. In the event, they only managed to serve Gannett, a Delaware company doing business in New York, which instantly filed a notice of removal, bouncing the case into the US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. And that’s how young Eddie learned about snap removal!

But Trump’s legal team had another trick up its sleeve! On January 31, they amended the complaint adding two Iowa lawmakers, US Rep Mariannette Miller-Meeks and former state senator Bradley Zaun, as plaintiffs. The move was a transparent attempt to get the case remanded to state court by defeating diversity jurisdiction. In fact, Selzer hadn’t even polled Zaun’s race. Which is how Paltzik learned about fraudulent joinder, as well as judicial discretion. Exercising the second, Judge Rebecca Ebinger declined to find the first, but nonetheless ruled that the lawmakers were not “indispensable” parties and denied the motion for joinder. On May 23, she ordered Trump to file an amended complaint without the rando politicians in seven days.

Judge Ebinger did give the plaintiff a gift of sorts, though. Noting that snap removal hadn’t been definitively blessed by the Eighth Circuit, she certified the issue for interlocutory appeal. Trump immediately accepted the invitation and secured a brief stay until July 18 to file his amended complaint.

But time waits for no clown, and in the meantime the Iowa state legislature unanimously passed a bill to create an expedited motion for media defendants to dismiss SLAPP suits that target the freedom of the press. That bill, House File 472, was signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds on May 19 and takes effect on July 1.

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By Above The Law

Had Trump filed his amended complaint on June 1, as instructed, he’d have been in the clear. But amending his complaint on July 18 would likely have subjected his garbage suit to the fee-shifting provision of the new anti-SLAPP law in the unlikely scenario that he was able to persuade the Eighth Circuit to remand him to state court.

And so, with that anti-SLAPP clock ticking, Trump’s lawyers put on their MAGA hats and hatched a clever plan to get back into state court one day before the new law was scheduled to go into effect. On Monday, they filed a notice of voluntary dismissal in federal court and simultaneously re-filed in state court. If they could just remember to serve the Iowa defendants first, they’d be home free!

Except … THEY FORGOT ABOUT THEIR APPEAL TO THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT.

Trump’s pending appeal divested the trial court of jurisdiction to dismiss his case. He needed to dismiss that appeal before voluntarily dismissing the complaint in the district court. Which he could have done, even without the defendants’ consent, so long as he did it first (and gave the court sufficient time to enter an order of dismissal).

And that’s how counselor Paltzik learned about Rule 42 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure!

Hours after Trump tried to nope out of his lawsuit, Gannett moved to strike the notice of dismissal as improper. Today, Judge Ebinger ordered Trump’s lawyers to respond to that motion to strike within 24 hours. Can’t wait to see what vagaries of civil procedure these geniuses learn next!

It’s difficult to imagine what they’ll say, but given that this is the team that thinks being wrong about math is a tort, they’ll undoubtedly come up with something. But for all intents and purposes, even if they win, the federal court will enter an order of dismissal dated July 2 or later. And that means the deadline for Trump to sneak into state court ahead of the new anti-SLAPP law has almost certainly come and gone.

*Liz Dye and Andrew Torrez produce the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast.

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Gannett Company - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gannett_Company

2.

Gannett Company, Inc. is a publicly traded American media holding company headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia, near McLean in Greater Washington DC. It is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher as measured by total daily ...

Number of employees‎: ‎24,200 (2016)

Net income‎: ‎US$ 52.710 million (2016)

Headquarters‎: ‎Tysons Corner, Virginia‎, U.S. ...

Total assets‎: ‎US$ 2.844 billion (2016)

List of Gannett Company assets - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gannett_Company_assets

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Jump to Newspapers - Newspapers[edit]

Gannett is cutting 1,000 newspaper jobs - ABC News

abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5584388

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Gannett GCI is eliminating 1,000 jobs, including 600 layoffs, across its newspaper operations, a company spokeswoman said Thursday. USA TODAY, the ...

Print media

Who owns newspaper companies? The banks, funds, and investors and their (big) slices of the industry

By MARTIN LANGEVELD @MartinLangeveld March 7, 2011, 10 a.m.

Who owns America’s newspapers?

In January, I detailed how a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital, which played a role in the shakeup at MediaNews Group, also had significant holdings in newspaper groups Freedom Communications, Philadelphia Newspaper Holdings, Journal Register Company, Tribune, and the Canadian newspaper firm Postmedia Network — all firms with current or recent bankruptcy status.

After noticing that Alden also owned, as of December 31, 3.91 percent of Gannett’s common stock, I surveyed all of the U.S. public newspaper companies to see whether Alden pops up elsewhere as well. It turns out that, other than Alden’s stake in Gannett, there’s little crossover between the principal investors in the public companies and those that have picked up the “distressed opportunities” created by trips through bankruptcy court.

First, here’s a set of slides detailing the top investors in each of the publicly-owned newspaper publishers. I’ve included among these News Corporation (both the class A and class B common stock), but for the rest of this analysis, News Corp. is excluded because its global multimedia holdings in film, television, magazines and book dwarf the entire rest of the American newspaper business. (Note: All holding and valuations throughout this post are as of December 31, 2010.)

Note that these lists include both institutional investments (banks, pension funds, hedge funds) and mutual funds (pooled investments owned by individuals or corporations). Either way, the listed investor can vote the shares and in theory could influence strategy — but without board seats real influence is minimal. Most of these investors are looking for growth or dividends, not operational involvement.

What stands out on these slides is that, with a few exceptions, ownership is diversified to the point that no single entity owns more than 10 percent. The exceptions are noteworthy but are longstanding stakes that don’t point to the kind of financial restructuring that Alden and others are signaling in the private post-bankruptcy sector of the business. The entire 10-percent-plus club consists of:

Edward W. Scripps Trust: 22.55 percent of E.W. Scripps. (The trust was established in 1922 for the benefit of Scripps heirs and has not invested outside of the Scripps group of papers.)

Berkshire Hathaway: 20.45 percent of Washington Post Company. (Also a long-term investment, acquired more than 30 years ago — Warren Buffett said recently he would never sell a single share, even though he was stepping down from the Post board.)

Ariel Investments: 18.95 percent of Lee Enterprises

GAMCO Investors: 13.07 percent of Journal Communications

Rupert Murdoch: 39.71 percent of News Corp. Class B common stock. (This gives Murdoch effective control, but in terms of market capitalization, his stake is just 13.1 percent.)

Which investors are making the biggest bets in the newspaper business? To find out, I aggregated and ranked the total newspaper holdings of all of the top investors in each company. Here’s the result (leaving out News Corp., as noted above):

Berkshire Hathaway‘s Washington Post Company holding, it turns out, is the biggest single investment in U.S. newspapers, with a current value of $759 million. Not far behind, though, is Vanguard, with $703 million invested through a variety of funds in every public newspaper company: Washington Post, A.H. Belo, Gannett, Journal Communications, McClatchy, New York Times, Scripps, Media General, and Lee Enterprises. If this were one big company, Vanguard would own 6.74 percent of it.

As Wall Street investments go, though, Vanguard’s across-the-board bet on newspapers is smaller than a rounding error — it has $1.4 trillion in invested assets, so its newspaper holdings are about 1/20th of a percent of its investments. And, to put the U.S. publishers in perspective versus the News Corp. juggernaut, Vanguard’s investment in News Corp. alone is worth $2.5 billion.

After Berkshire Hathaway and Vanguard, the list drops quickly to smaller investments by JP Morgan Chase ($543 million), Ariel Investments ($497 million), and BlackRock ($335 million). (BlackRock, with $3.6 trillion under management, is the world’s largest money manager and the sixth-largest owner of Gannett stock.)

A few names do cross over between the “distressed opportunities” investors I listed last month and those with some holdings of public (and not-quite-as-distressed) newspaper companies. They include:

Alden Global Capital: As noted above, it has a major stake in Gannett; it also owns 1.53 percent of McClatchy and 0.75% of Media General.

Credit Suisse: An investor in the Philadelphia Media Network, it also has 3.56 percent of A.H. Belo, 2.59 percent of Journal Communications, 3.26 percent of McClatchy, and 3.21 percent of Gannett.

JP Morgan Chase: With distressed holdings in Tribune, it also controls, through several funds, 4.07 percent of A.H. Belo, 11.50 percent of Gannett, 1.37 percent of Journal Communications, and 3.15 percent of Washington Post.

Generally, at all of these companies, the total institutional/mutual fund ownership is between 60 and 90 percent; insiders hold no more than single-digit percentages in the aggregate.

Conclusion: While Alden and others, using MediaNews as a base of operations, may be looking to engineer some mergers, consolidations, and realignments in the distressed sector, they don’t have a significant enough toehold in the more stable public sector to have a similar impact there. That doesn’t preclude the possibility of wider strategic moves beyond the potential for a MediaNews/Freedom combination (and perhaps other mergers or trades involving Tribune and Journal Register) — but they will have to result from persuasion rather than clout. MediaNews executive chairman Dean Singleton, in his new role as strategic dealmaker, will be one voice trying to do the persuading.