On October 13, 2016, David E. McCraw, the deputy general counsel at the Times, wrote what quickly became known, in legal circles, as one of the most memorable lawyer letters in decades. McCraw was responding to Donald Trump’s threat to sue the Times, after it published an article in which two women accused the Republican Presidential nominee of groping them.

“The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation,” McCraw wrote to Marc Kasowitz, one of Trump’s many attorneys. “Mr. Trump has bragged about his non-consensual sexual touching of women. He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio host’s request to discuss Mr. Trump’s own daughter as a ‘piece of ass.’ Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr. Trump’s unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.”

The letter went viral, with more than a million people reading it on the Times’ Web site. McCraw recounts his dealings with Trump’s team in his new book, “Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts.” He also tells stories about the newsroom (including on the night of the 2016 election), describes how the Times reported stories on Trump, Bill O’Reilly, and Harvey Weinstein, and, in the process, explains what a libel lawyer really does.

I recently spoke by phone with McCraw. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the advantages a big paper like the Times has in libel battles, why it’s harder to commit libel against a political figure, and the real threat to press freedom in the era of “fake news.”

When Times reporters and editors are working on a story that they believe is controversial or potentially libellous or potentially explosive, where do you come into the process, and how does that work?

There’s no set pattern for a story like the Harvey Weinstein story. I was contacted very early by Jodi Kantor, and she laid out what her reporting was going to be looking at. Sometimes I’ll be assisting with Freedom of Information requests on stories that deal with the government, and I will be involved with that process, again, shortly after the reporter has the idea for a story.

At the other extreme, I get involved two and a half minutes before a story is to be published. I usually push it out to five, so I can read it, but sometimes at the last minute someone will say, “I really think this may raise a legal issue. Let’s run it by legal.” In between those two extremes, there’s a lot of variation. It’s fair to say that, in most cases, where the issue is solely whether it’s libellous or whether it invades privacy or whether it has some other legal problems, I’m going to be doing it in the twenty-four hours leading up to publication.

What are you looking for to determine whether something is libellous? And would you go about your job any differently if you were at, say, a small newspaper in Cleveland?

The principal thing that all libel lawyers look at now is, inevitably, implications. The law of libel has swung very heavily toward causes of action, lawsuits brought not on the basis of the literal words but on the implications flowing from the words. What that means is that libel lawyers read it in a cynical manner, if you will, trying to understand how this may be construed, how it may be spun by someone who doesn’t like the story. Implications, number one.

We also are really concerned about the minor characters in a story, the minor players. They tend to be the people who bring the libel suits. Over and over again, we’ve seen that the person in the headline, the person in the lede, is not the person who is likely to be a libel threat. More often than not, it’s somebody who’s deep in the story, who for whatever reason feels that the story has not accurately portrayed him or her.

So in the case of Harvey Weinstein or Bill O’Reilly or the President, what would be an example of who this could be?

In a story that deals with sexual harassment in the workplace, I usually have great confidence that we have the story right about the person who is the focus of the story. I’m looking very carefully at the H.R. director, if he’s mentioned in the story. I’m looking very closely at the agent who was told about the sexual harassment and is portrayed as not having done anything. I’m concerned about the colleagues. Many times, those people are the ones who, first, don’t really want to be associated for the rest of their Google life with that particular story, and, second, are concerned about us implying that they didn’t do all they should have or that they looked the other way. If we take care to make sure that we have been as comprehensive, as careful with those people as we have with the main actors in the story, then we’re in good shape.

You asked about the hypothetical small newspaper and whether that person would go about work differently. The answer is this: because the Times has a long history of not settling libel suits in the United States with payments to the defendant, we tend to be in cases for a long time. We aren’t looking for a way to exit early with a small payment. That has a twofold effect. One is we’re going to press really hard to make sure we have the story right and legally sound. The other thing is I think we tend to be more fearless in the face of a legal threat. I think that, at many papers, the letter received before publication has a profound effect on the journalism that gets done or doesn’t get done. We accept that being threatened, even being sued, is part of doing business. If we have to live in fear of that, we’re not really going to be doing what we need to do for our readers.

You have a scene in the book where you talk about the reaction to Trump’s election in the newsroom on Election Night. You basically say you’ve been to a lot of newsrooms on elections, and even when the reporters are liberal, when Republicans win, they react kind of stoically. But in this case, you could tell that people were kind of shocked. Do you think that that reaction had more to do with the fact that Trump is a different kind of conservative or with the fact that he specifically represented what a lot of reporters perceived and were open about perceiving as a threat to their industry?

I think the reaction on Election Night was more a reaction to what had been reported on the run-up. I think that, across the United States, in media and news sites and at polling sites, the chances of Trump winning seemed very, very small. I think the reaction was that. Obviously, it was also colored by how combative Trump had been with the media.