For Donald Trump, crime in Washington, D.C., is not just any other issue. On the contrary, the president sees it as a test of an experiment he’s heavily invested in.

As the Republican sees it, crime in the nation’s capital is a riddle he has solved. All it took was a combination of deportations and National Guard deployments to create what he has described as a local “renaissance.”

At a White House event a few weeks ago, Trump took credit for having created “one of the safest places in the United States,” adding, “It was a graffiti-filled, crime-filled mess. We turned it into Shangri-La.”

But while the president has spent nearly a full year patting himself on the back, claiming credit for having effectively eliminated crime in Washington, some relevant details keep getting in the way. In the spring, NPR reported on the latest analysis of crime data from the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, which found that Trump’s policy “has reduced petty property crimes, but has had little to no effect on violent crime, despite the high cost to taxpayers.”

Last month, the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, published related findings that indicate the administration’s policy has had far less success in reducing violent crime than the president would have the public believe.

Evidently, this didn’t sit well with the man in the Oval Office. The New York Times reported:

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file [a defamation lawsuit] if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.

Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.

If that does not happen, the threatening letter concluded, the president is prepared to file a $5 billion civil suit. (It’s not clear whether Trump ever actually read the report, although he recently denounced it as a “Radical Left SCAM” after having seen a television report on the analysis.)

If the goal was to get the Center for American Progress to retreat, the effort hasn’t worked, at least not yet. Tanden said in a statement that the research organization she leads would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action. As for the underlying report, Tanden said it was “grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis,” even if the findings proved “inconvenient” to the administration.

“This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless,” she added. “A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that is contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us.”

The Times characterized this as Trump’s “latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment.”

And while that’s certainly true, there’s a related legislative dimension to this: The Washington Post reported earlier this month that the Pentagon’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington “is set to cost an additional $1.4 billion” through the end of Trump’s second term. The price tag led Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to respond, “While American families are getting flattened by skyrocketing costs, Donald Trump is spending $1.4 billion to keep troops on the streets in Washington for years on end. The National Guard are not pawns, and taxpayer dollars are not a piggy bank for Trump’s political stunts.”

In other words, the administration doesn’t just want to silence critics, and it doesn’t just want the president’s preferred policy to be effective, it also wants the political world to discount the evidence showing how ineffective Trump’s approach has been — in order to justify a hefty taxpayer-financed check from Congress.

Time will tell whether Trump follows through on the lawsuit threat, although I have hunch the Center for American Progress’ lawyers wouldn’t mind having a peek behind some closed curtains as part of the discovery process. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump threatens think tank over D.C. crime report, extending intimidation campaign appeared first on MS NOW.

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