Podcaster Tim Pool filed a defamation lawsuit against Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign Thursday.
Pool says he has faced an increase in death threats and that suspicious people have been monitoring his place of business, two developments he finds alarming after two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump.
“It’s putting a target on my back for things I don’t believe and things I actually argue against,” Pool told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday.
Pool’s lawsuit focuses on one specific post on the social media platform X from Harris’ campaign, on Aug. 31.
“Trump operatives say their Project 2025 plan is to give Trump total, unchecked legal power so they can jail and execute those who don’t support Trump if he wins (They have since scrubbed this video from YouTube),” the campaign posted.
The Harris campaign included a video clip from May 31, in which Pool calls for putting Democrats in jail if they get convicted of crimes. Elsewhere in the video, Pool insists that any jailed Democrats should face charges through the legal process, with their civil rights honored.
Pool’s Response to the Post
Pool claims the X post is egregiously false on multiple levels.
First, he calls it “absolutely incorrect” to say he is a “Trump operative.”
Second, he has no affiliation with Project 2025 or the organization behind it, The Heritage Foundation.
Third, “It stated that I wanted Trump to have extra-judicial authority to jail and execute the people who refuse to support him, which is, I believe, the most shockingly extreme thing you could accuse someone of advocating for or believing.”
“I didn’t specifically say ‘political opponents,’ it said ‘those who don’t support him,’ as if to imply your run-of-the-mill voter who says, ‘I don’t support Trump,’ may face extrajudicial execution by some kind of psychotic dictatorial regime,” the podcaster explained. “It’s an absurdity, it’s insane.”
He framed the claim, which he said is false, this way: “One of the top presidential campaigns claims that a top global podcast, prominent political show is calling for run-of-the-mill voters who don’t support Trump to be executed should he win.”
Pool has long opposed the death penalty, and he went on to condemn the death penalty in that May 31 video. As for the claim that he “scrubbed” the video from YouTube, Pool says he only removed the video because YouTube flagged it, but that the entire video remains up on Rumble and other platforms.
Increase in Threats
Pool said the Harris campaign’s post led to an increase in threats against him and his company.
“Within a few days of this post going up, a strange man started lurking around one of my properties, our old studio location where we no longer operate out of,” he recalled. Employees told him that “a strange individual wearing a dress was trespassing on the property and filming the building.”
“This individual apparently got into a fight, injuring one of our employees,” he added.
“I have absolutely seen an uptick in” social media messages, “some insinuating to the effect of wanting me to die or intending to have me die.”
Pool said he receives “death threats… on a regular basis.”
He said he and his company were swatted 13 times in 2022, that malignant actors deceived police into sending an emergency response team to his offices. Police once searched his office while he was live on air. Pool said he received bomb threats with “bomb machines” and credible threats, he said.
“But after this tweet goes out, I certainly noticed a dramatic increase in messages,” he said. Threats used to come “once or twice a month,” but Pool said now the number is “in the hundreds.”
Defamation Hurdles
James R. Lawrence III, a partner at Envisage Law and former chief counsel at the Food and Drug Administration at the end of the Trump administration, is representing Pool in the defamation lawsuit.
In order for Pool’s lawsuit to succeed under the Supreme Court’s precedents starting with New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Pool has to prove that the Harris campaign spread a falsehood against him with “actual malice,” or a “reckless disregard for the truth.”
Lawrence admitted that the standard represents a high bar, but he cited the case of D.A. King v. Southern Poverty Law Center—a defamation case that cleared a key legal hurdle last year—as evidence of a similar case.
King pleaded that the Southern Poverty Law Center defamed his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, by calling it an “anti-immigrant hate group,” years after the SPLC had explicitly stated that it was not a “hate group.” This key detail bolstered King’s case and made it easier for him to claim that the SPLC knew it was false to call his organization a “hate group.”
Similarly, Pool and Lawrence argued that the Harris campaign must have done research on Pool’s show, and that a modicum of research would have revealed Pool’s opposition to the death penalty and his support for civil liberties.
“They state that it had since been scrubbed by YouTube, which would indicate they did some looking into what the show actually was,” Pool said.
As for the clip the campaign posted, it “had been out in the internet or on the internet being discussed for two months,” Lawrence noted.
Outlets such as Mediaite had covered the interview, and that coverage “does not attribute these atrocious views to Tim in particular … but focuses on what others on the broadcast were saying.”
None of the reports from the time claim that Pool “advocated for … Donald Trump to be made dictator, for the Constitution to be suspended, and for President Trump in a second Trump administration to imprison and then execute his political enemies,” the lawyer noted. “You don’t see any of that in the reporting.”
Lawrence also noted that the tweet has been viewed by 12 million people on X, and that it has made it more difficult for Pool to reach out to liberals and moderates with whom he would like to engage ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
