PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia will remain on the long roster of legal venues where Donald Trump has failed to convince a judge that his job as president in 2020 gives him immunity from lawsuits now.
Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Erdos this week rejected a request from Trump and his presidential campaign to dismiss a defamation case filed in 2021 by James Savage, a Delaware County voting machine supervisor who accuses Trump of pushing unsubstantiated claims that he tampered with the 2020 election results.
Savage said remarks from Trump and his attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and two Delaware County Republican poll watchers made him a target for hatred, ridicule, and physical threats.
Savage also sued Giuliani and the poll watchers.
Erdos based his ruling an October 2022 letter Trump, who was no longer president, sent to the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s letter included his Delco allegations in a litany of debunked election fraud claims.
The judge said he will rule soon on Trump’s claim of immunity in two other instances — his phone-in testimony during a state Senate committee hearing in Gettysburg three weeks after the 2020 election and a tweet from Trump two days later. Trump mentioned the Delco claims in both.
This is a fight Trump has lost twice already.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., last year ruled that Trump does not have presidential immunity in several lawsuits that accuse him of causing the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Another federal judge in New York ruled two weeks ago that Trump has no immunity for comments he made in 2019 about the writer E. Jean Carroll, who had accused him of sexual assault.
A jury in a separate federal lawsuit in May backed Carroll’s claim of sexual assault, awarding her a $5 million judgment.
Michael Madaio, Trump’s attorney, argued Tuesday in Philadelphia that Trump relied on sworn statements from the Delco poll watchers and never mentioned Savage by name.
J. Connor Corcoran, Savage’s attorney, noted that Trump’s lies about the 2020 election had been rejected in more than 60 court cases.
“This was gross speculation that was manufactured to create chaos,” Corcoran said of Trump’s Delco claims. “In this case, it was successful.”
Trump faces a long docket of court cases — including a federal indictment for keeping sensitive government documents after leaving office and a New York criminal case for allegedly paying hush money to keep an affair quiet during his 2016 campaign, plus a New York civil case that accuses him and his company of financial fraud.
