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Of all the lawsuits fought and won daily against the Trump administration, there was recently a profound moment of reckoning for free speech and a free press that got far too little attention when the litigation ended with a settlement. The victory in that case showed that Trumpism can be made to capitulate to the power of journalism and the rule of law. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Ilyse Hogue, the co-founder and CEO of Catalyst for American Futures and a senior fellow at New America, about Media Matters’ victory in a lawsuit against the Federal Trade Commission for an investigation connected to a dispute between the site and Donald Trump hanger-on Elon Musk. Hogue is also a co-founder of the Speaking With American Men project, and she spent nearly a decade as president and CEO of NARAL–Pro Choice America. Her 2020 book and podcast The Lie That Binds remains one of the most important guidebooks about the far-right takeover of the courts and the machinery of government. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: You have worked as an adviser with Media Matters for a very long time, and the organization just secured a big, big win, settling a case that went all the way to a federal appeals court in D.C. Can you tell us what the lawsuit was about and maybe describe for me why this lawsuit—in a frothing sea of lawsuits filed against the Trump administration—serves as a bellwether for you on issues of free speech, media, government control, and authoritarianism?
Ilyse Hogue: I go back to first principles on a lot of the projects that I work on. Are we fighting for freedom? Are we undercutting one of the core pillars of their operation, such as voter disenfranchisement, court capture, or the propaganda arm? So Media Matters for America has been around since 2004, and it serves as a media accountability group. It has done a good job of fact-checking right-wing media before it gets into what we call “mainstream media” in order to prevent the spread of right-wing narratives that are not grounded in fact. Media Matters has been very, very effective at this job, which has made it a target, quite honestly. The group has made enemies on the right for a long time by challenging them.
After Trump was elected in 2024, building on some threats the right had made about Media Matters, the FTC opened up an investigation into the organization that really could only be called a witch hunt. The investigation was so broad, so wide-ranging, and it reached so far back into the past, like from 2019 on, that you couldn’t justify it through any discrete lens the agency was trying to put on it. It was designed not only to try to silence MMFA but also to make an example of it so that everyone else in the free speech/civil society space would be like, Whoa, I do not want those people on me like that.
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So MMFA sued the FTC. This is a really important piece of the puzzle. A lot of other groups have been like: Nope, don’t come after me. What do you need? Others have settled. MMFA turned around and said, Absolutely not. The buck stops here. We’re suing the FTC so that it cannot continue this investigation. The federal district court found for Media Matters, saying this was clearly a retaliatory measure. The FTC appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, and it was argued in April by Nathaniel Zelinsky, from the Washington Litigation Group.
Since the title of this podcast is Amicus, it’s really important to understand that the amicus briefs in support of MMFA were from the right, the center, and the left. This was an unbelievable invasion that even the right-wing groups recognized: Whoa, if turnabout is fair play and there’s another administration and they’re coming after me, I don’t want that to happen. So, going into court, there was a very strong argument, and the government could not defend its case at all. It was a shellacking, quite honestly. And the government was so sure it was going to get a negative ruling that the it actually asked to withdraw the investigation before the ruling came down. Without getting too much in the weeds, Media Matters said, essentially that it could withdraw only if it agreed to a few terms, like not bringing this all back at a later date and a couple of other things. They agreed to a settlement last week that is really quite something in this environment that we’re living in.
The reason it was so important to me to support this work is, firstly, because of free speech, obviously. It’s almost cliché at this point, but when you’ve got an administration that is really reliant on this authoritarian grip on the media, allowing it to weaponize its own government agencies to shut down its critics, that absolutely has to be a red line. The other reason is that Media Matters and the organization’s president, Angelo Carusone, really wanted to fight and really understand the psychology of this government as a bully. The only way to beat a bully is to stand up. And, look, that takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of money. And it was successful, because what we’ve seen is that rolling over and hoping that the government goes away really just creates conditions for it to go after more and more and more people. So I’m very proud of this litigation and this result. I think there will be wide-ranging effects. I think the FTC will be careful about how it attempts investigations of civil society groups in the future. And I think it’s really important to celebrate victories when we’re living in really dark times.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk about the case is that I don’t think it got enough attention. We keep seeing government agencies abusing their own powers and terrorizing entities that are doing good and important work, and the impulse to buckle, to take the deal, to slink away is a rational impulse when you’re terrified. This lawsuit is a template for courage. And it’s a template for trusting that the courts will have your back if you have a meritorious case. It’s also a template for seeing that this administration will blink. Forcing it to blink is not a costless enterprise, but buckling is not costless either.
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