A Republican strategist, Cheri Jacobus, claims Donald Trump and his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, launched a smear campaign against her after she made critical comments about Trump in a CNN interview.
The New York Daily News reports Jacobus has filed a $4 million lawsuit against Trump and Lewandowski, claiming their efforts to damage her resulted in “bookings on cable news and opinion programs (being) cancelled, and requests for new bookings all but dried up,” according to the lawsuit.
Jacobus, the suit says, became “‘damaged goods,’ persona non grata, demoted from a network regular who appeared on news outlet such as Fox, Fox Business News and CNN several times a week during the presidential campaign to complete oblivion, with almost no television appearances whatsoever.”
According to a report in Politico, the lawsuit stems from comments Jacobus originally made on CNN’s New Day back in January, when she said Trump “comes off like a third grader faking his way through an oral report on current affairs.”
The next day, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Lewandowski said that Jacobus “came to the office on multiple occasion trying to get a job from the Trump campaign, and she wasn’t hired clearly she went off and was upset by that.”
Following a February 2 CNN appearance in which Jacobus criticized Trump’s claim that he does not get enough credit for self-funding his campaign, the businessman tweeted “@cherijacobus begged us for a job. We said no and she went hostile. A real dummy!”