President Trump on Tuesday again refiled a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a July 2025 report that he submitted a letter and explicit drawing to a birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein.A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last month, ruling he couldn’t claim the paper published the story with actual malice. Then Trump refiled and ran into another stumbling block on May 13, when U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that he couldn’t use the discovery process in his claims that the newspaper defamed him. In the new lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the Journal’s reporters tried to “falsely pass off as fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter” but “failed to show proof.”Trump’s reasoning for the lawsuit is hollow, especially considering that the House Oversight Committee included the birthday book, complete with the drawing from Trump, in a September release of Epstein materials from his estate. It’s more likely that Trump is trying to shake down the Journal for a big settlement and intimidate its owners, the Murdoch family, into favorable coverage.It’s a pattern that Trump has followed against other media companies, which ended up forking over money that supposedly is going to Trump’s presidential library. Trump also has pending defamation lawsuits against The New York Times for $15 billion and the BBC for $10 billion. It seems that he won’t stop until he’s made them pay for reporting that he doesn’t like.