The Center for American Progress (Cap) received a letter from Donald Trump’s lawyer threatening a $5bn lawsuit unless the liberal research organization retracts a report criticizing the effectiveness of the president’s National Guard rollout.

The report released 13 July argues that the National Guard deployment in Washington DC, Memphis and Los Angeles failed to have a measurable impact on crime in these cities despite an estimated cost of $1.7bn. The report looks at the falling rate of crime in cities without a National Guard intervention and concludes that they are not statistically different from the rate of decrease in those that had the intervention, noting that violent crime began falling well before Trump took office in 2025.

In response, Alejandro Brito, a personal lawyer of Trump, sent Cap a letter threatening suit if the center did not retract the research report, the New York Times reported Friday. Brito’s letter is a threat from Trump to sue the center in his personal capacity, and not on behalf of the federal government.

The center released a statement on Friday standing by its report and castigating the threat as an attack on the public’s right to speak truth to power.

“Based on analysis of crime data, our report demonstrated facts about the National Guard deployments that are inconvenient to the Trump administration,” wrote Neera Tanden, Cap’s president and CEO. “This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless. A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”

Brito argues in a letter demanding the center’s retraction that “the effect on the mind of the reader and viewer of the Statements that Defendants intended to impose is that the President of the United States knowingly deceived the American people, manipulated crime statistics for political advantage, exploited public fear, abused military and executive authority for an ulterior purpose, staged a sham law enforcement operation, and then lied about its success.”

Cap’s response to Trump’s legal complaint describes its claim of defamation as “absurd” and that its conclusions are statements of fact about their meticulous research.

The report and commentary “on their face, concern crime statistics and causality, or actions of the federal government, not President Trump himself”, the center wrote in response to the threat letter. “In addition to being true, these statements cannot defame President Trump because they are not about him.”

Washington’s leading liberal thinktank, Cap was founded in 2003 by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, who later served as the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.