The nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) announced on January 7 that it will defend longtime Iowa Poll director J. Ann Selzer at no charge in the lawsuit Donald Trump filed last month. Trump sued Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register, and its parent company Gannett over the final pre-election Iowa Poll, which showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 points. The Republican later carried Iowa by a 13-point margin.

FIRE’s chief counsel Bob Corn-Revere said in a news release, “Punishing someone for their political prediction is about as unconstitutional as it gets,” adding, “This is America. No one should be afraid to predict the outcome of an election. Whether it’s from a pollster, or you, or me, such political expression is fully and unequivocally protected by the First Amendment.”

Trump’s lawsuit misuses Iowa’s consumer fraud statute, making unsupported claims that the last Selzer poll was an “unfair act or practice” deceiving consumers. FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh said in the January 7 news release, “Donald Trump is abusing the legal system to punish speech he dislikes. If you have to pay lawyers and spend time in court to defend your free speech, then you don’t have free speech.”

The group added,

The lawsuit fits the very definition of a “SLAPP” suit — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. Such tactical claims are filed purely for the purpose of harassing and imposing punishing litigation costs on perceived opponents, not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success. In other words, the lawsuit is the punishment. As Trump once colorfully put it after losing a lawsuit: “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

Iowa is one of fifteen states with no anti-SLAPP law. Those statutes allow defendants to “quickly challenge the merits of the case before incurring substantial legal costs and a time-consuming, intrusive discovery process.” The Iowa House has approved anti-SLAPP bills, most recently by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2023. But such legislation has stalled in the Iowa Senate Judiciary Committee. State Representative Steve Holt, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, confirmed to Bleeding Heartland in December that he plans to introduce an anti-SLAPP bill again during the legislature’s 2025 session.

The Des Moines Register reported on January 8 that FIRE will also defend Selzer in a class action lawsuit filed in Polk County District Court. The Center for American Rights is representing plaintiff Dennis Donnelly (a Des Moines Register subscriber) in that case. Their court filing argues that Selzer and co-defendants committed fraudulent misrepresentation, consumer fraud, and professional malpractice by intentionally misleading subscribers about the state of the presidential race in Iowa. It further alleges that the inaccurate poll interfered with the right to vote.

FIRE said in its news release that by providing pro bono support, the group “is helping to remove the punishment-by-process incentive of SLAPP suits.”

Instead of charging clients like Selzer for representation, FIRE and similar nonprofits often recoup attorneys’ fees after winning cases or securing settlements.

FIRE and Corn-Revere represented two Iowa State University students who filed suit in 2014 after the university blocked the use of the Cy mascot on t-shirts for the student chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. A U.S. District Court found and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ISU administrators violated the First Amendment when they imposed “unique scrutiny” on the chapter, due to the students’ advocacy for legalizing marijuana.

The state of Iowa eventually settled that case, paying $150,000 in damages ($75,000 for each student plaintiff) and legal fees and costs totaling more than $791,000. Most of the attorneys’ fees—$598,208.17 for work at the trial court level and $193,260 for when the case was before the Eighth Circuit—went to the Davis Wright Tremaine law firm, where Corn-Revere was a longtime partner before joining FIRE as chief counsel in 2023.

Disclosure: Corn-Revere co-authored a legal memo for the Institute for Free Speech in 2019 about my difficulties in receiving press credentials from the Iowa legislature and governor’s office. The memo argued that I am “entitled to the same First Amendment protections as ‘traditional’ journalists,” and that the policies of the legislature and governor’s office “suffer from serious constitutional deficiencies.”

The Institute for Free Speech filed a federal lawsuit on my behalf in January 2024. We argued that the Iowa House chief clerk engaged in unconstitutional content-based and viewpoint-based discrimination when she arbitrarily applied “an ever-shifting credentialing system” to deny me access for years. That case was settled after the chief clerk granted me Iowa House credentials for the remainder of the 2024 legislative session. The state paid the Institute for Free Speech $49,004 in legal fees as part of the settlement agreement.