Trump’s team is less concerned about the threat of legal action than about the appearance of Donald Trump being preoccupied with opinions offered on cable television by an unaligned Republican operative. | Getty GOP strategist threatens Trump with lawsuit Trump claims Cheri Jacobus begged his team for a job, but she says they first reached out to her.

The script has been flipped on Donald Trump.

Trump and his team are well known for threatening lawsuits, but on Thursday, the celebrity mogul and his campaign manager were the ones on the receiving end of a legal threat.


Via her lawyer, Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus sent a letter warning the pair to cease and desist from making “false and defamatory” statements about her or face legal action.

The letter, obtained by POLITICO, refers to statements made by Trump and campaign manager Corey Lewandowski accusing Jacobus of holding an anti-Trump grudge because she tried unsuccessfully to get a job on his campaign.

Jacobus’s letter--sent by lawyer Bruce Barket of Barket, Marion, Epstein & Kearon in New York--says the pair are misrepresenting what happened. According to the letter, it was an employee of Trump who first reached out to Jacobus to ask if he she was interested in a position on the campaign.

“By impugning Ms. Jacobus’s status as an objective and serious political commentator, your live-television statements to Morning Joe and follow-up ‘Tweets’ were per se defamatory because they painted her as petty and biased in a profession permitting neither,” states the letter, which concludes, “Any violation of this cease-and-desist demand will be treated in Court accordingly.”

Neither Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, nor a Trump campaign spokeswoman responded to requests for comment.

Jacobus provided POLITICO with screenshots of a May, 2015 Facebook message conversation between herself and Jim Dornan, a Republican operative then working for Trump. “Would you consider working for us? We need a top notch communications director,” wrote Dornan.

The two then arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in New York. Jacobus met twice with Lewandowski at Trump Tower last spring, but according to Jacobus, both parties walked away uninterested after the second meeting.

Since that meeting, Jacobus has been both Trump defender and critic.

The letter cites a summer appearance on CNN in which Jacobus defended Trump against attacks on comments he made disparaging undocumented Mexican immigrants during his June campaign announcement. “The only way the left can make points is when they start calling him and others racist and basically lie about what he meant,” the letter quotes Jacobus saying.

But in late January, after Trump decided to boycott the final Republican debate, Jacobus appeared on CNN and called the businessman a “bad debater.” She added, “He comes off like a third grader faking his way through an oral report on current affairs.”

The next morning, Lewandowski appeared on MSNBC. According to the letter, he stated that Jacobus “came to the office on multiple occasions trying to get a job from the Trump campaign, and when she wasn’t hired clearly she went off and was upset by that.”

On Wednesday, after she made another appearance on CNN, Trump tweeted that Jacobus “begged us for a job. We said no and she went hostile. A real dummy!”

According a person who conferred recently with a top Trump adviser about the matter, Trump’s team is less concerned about the threat of legal action than about the appearance of Trump being preoccupied with opinions offered on cable television by an unaligned Republican operative in the heat of a contested primary campaign.

Trump and his staff are no strangers to threats of lawsuits, but typically they’re the ones making them.

In 2006, Trump sued journalist Timothy O’Brien for allegedly low-balling his net worth. Trump lost on appeal. In 2013, Trump sued comedian Bill Maher when Maher did not give $5 million to charity after the businessman produced his birth certificate. Maher had jokingly offered to donate the money if Trump — a leading proponent of the theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States — could prove he was not the “spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.” Widely ridiculed for the lawsuit, Trump withdrew it.

The Washington Post reported in October that Lewandowski threatened to sue the paper if it reported that a super PAC with close ties to Trump’s campaign had the candidate’s blessing. The PAC was run by a longtime friend of Lewandowski’s, and the Post reported that it had contacted potential donors using information provided by Trump’s personal secretary.

In July, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sparred with a Daily Beast reporter over a story about Trump’s ex-wife accusing him of assault . In an interview that turned hostile and profane, Cohen repeatedly threatened the reporter with lawsuits.

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have,” Cohen said. “And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know.”