Trump is using settlements to extract bribes. Judges can step in to stop it
Feb. 6, 2025 / Seth Stern
Plenty of commentators — myself included — have scolded ABC and Meta for settling Donald Trump’s frivolous lawsuits to curry favor with the president, with CBS reportedly considering doing so. The criticism is deserved. How are journalists supposed to cover Trump’s rampant corruption when their employers participate in it?
But they’re not the only ones to blame for capitulating to Trump. So are the judges who bless these extortionate agreements. Judges, after all, don’t have to blindly sign off on litigants’ settlement agreements when there are glaring indicators of impropriety. Settlement agreements, like any other contract, can be voided if they are contrary to public policy.
Judges are entitled — maybe even obligated to — to inquire about, scrutinize, and ultimately reject settlements when there’s reason to believe they were procured via fraud, duress, collusion, or coercion, among other reasons.
Judges exercise these powers sparingly for multiple reasons, some good (not wanting to substitute their judgment for that of private parties) and some bad (not wanting to pass up an opportunity to clear a case from their docket). And they’re particularly reluctant to interfere in cases involving sophisticated parties with ample resources and high-quality legal representation. Disputes between billionaire presidents and gigantic corporations would ordinarily fit that bill.
But these are not ordinary times. In the case of CBS, for example, it’s been widely reported that the network is considering settling in hopes the Trump administration will look favorably upon its parent company’s merger plans. That’s despite the obviously frivolous nature of Trump’s legal theory that CBS violated consumer protection law by editing an interview for time.
Not only that, but CBS just produced a transcript of the interview that definitively shows there was nothing nefarious about the edits…
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