Trump Will Ask Supreme Court to Revive $475 Million CNN Suit

President Donald Trump told the U.S. Supreme Court he intends to ask the justices to revive his $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN over use of the term “Big Lie” in reporting on his claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court for a 60-day extension to Aug. 15 to file his petition for review of a lower court’s dismissal of the case, according to a request that was formally docketed by the justices on Friday. The filing, the first sign that Trump would seek to revive the suit, indicated his appeal would double down on his claims about the 2020 election.

“In reality, President Trump was lawfully pursuing then-unresolved, and now proven, claims about election irregularities in the 2020 presidential election,” Trump attorney Alejandro Brito said in the filing.

The case is one of several Trump has filed against the media in recent years, including multibillion-dollar suits against the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the British Broadcasting Corp. The cases broadly accuse the outlets of publishing false claims about Trump’s conduct and finances, leading to allegations that he is trying to silence media criticism.

Trump will ask the Supreme Court to take the CNN case in part to weigh in on a broader legal question. According to the filing, the president wants the justices to weigh when a jury — and not a judge — should be asked to determine whether an allegedly defamatory statement would be viewed by the public as opinion or fact.

Trump sued CNN in 2022, accusing the network of smearing him by frequently using the term “Big Lie” to describe his unsubstantiated theory that Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election was the result of massive voter fraud. Trump also claimed the network harmed his reputation by hosting guests who compared him to Adolf Hitler.

CNN declined to comment on Trump’s planned Supreme Court appeal.

The development comes as Trump’s BBC suit hit a snag. On Monday, the judge in that case scolded Trump for missing a June 5 deadline to respond to the British network’s motion to dismiss the suit.

U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman, a Trump appointee, ordered the president to explain by June 12 whether the BBC’s request to toss the case should be considered unopposed and why Brito and other lawyers should not be sanctioned “for their apparent disregard of court deadlines.”

“Rather than timely file his response, the plaintiff filed two eleventh-hour procedural motions the day his response was due,” Altman wrote. “Neither motion explained why the plaintiff delayed so long in seeking the requested relief or asked that we extend the response deadline.”

A representative of Trump’s legal team didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The suit against CNN was dismissed in July 2023 by US District Judge Raag Singhal in Florida, a Trump appointee who held that while CNN’s statements where “repugnant,” they “were not, as a matter of law, defamatory.”

“This case involves political speech of the highest order,” Singhal wrote at the time. “The First Amendment has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for public office.”

His ruling was upheld in November 2025 by a three-judge federal appeals court panel that included two Trump appointees.

Trump contended in his CNN suit that the network had tainted his image by using “ever-more scandalous” labels to describe him in broadcasts, including “racist,” “Russian lackey,” and “insurrectionist,” culminating in false comparisons to the late Nazi leader.

Top photo: The CNN Center in Atlanta. Bloomberg.