President-elect Donald Trump announced a lawsuit against a media outlet Monday on allegations of "election interference," and First Lady Jill Biden announced that she would step down from teaching. 

Trump sues Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, Des Moines Register over ‘election interference’

President-elect Donald Trump launched another lawsuit against a media outlet Monday, this time accusing the Des Moines Register newspaper and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer of “election interference” by publishing a poll days before Election Day showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading the race.

The lawsuit filed in Polk County, Iowa, comes days after ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit with the incoming president, agreeing to give $15 million to Trump’s presidential library and pay $1 million in legal fees. And it comes after a news conference Monday at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida where Trump railed against the media and threatened the impending litigation against Selzer and the newspaper she partnered with.

The lawsuit accuses the paper and pollster of conspiring with the Democratic Party and Harris to “create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.” The alleged conspiracy violates Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act, which bars the “misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, or omission of a material fact” with the intention of misleading consumers, or in this case voters, Trump’s lawyers argued.

“She's a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing,” Trump said Monday. 

Trump’s attorneys are asking for a jury trial and argued their client “has sustained actual damages due to the need to expend extensive time and resources, including direct federal campaign expenditures, to mitigate and counteract the harm” of the inaccurate poll.

“Because the Defendants’ conduct was willful and wanton, President Trump is also entitled to statutory damages three times the actual damages suffered,” the attorneys argued in the filing, without offering specifics on the financial penalty they hope to be rewarded.

In a statement, Des Moines Register spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton said “we have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer.”

“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” Anton added.

Selzer, a well-respected pollster who long earned praise from both sides of the aisle for her accurate polls of Iowa, found Harris leading 47% to 44% in a poll taken at the end of October. Trump ultimately won the state by 13 percentage points. Selzer, 68, retired from election polling shortly after the race, though she said her decision came long before.

Jill Biden says she has closed the book on teaching at Northern Virginia Community College

Jill Biden has closed the book on her teaching career at a Virginia community college.

The first lady, who has spent the past 40 years teaching in classrooms, announced Monday that she had taught her final class at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria last week. The surprise announcement came during a virtual "thank you" event with teachers tuning in from around the country.

First lady Jill Biden, center, is joined by Becky Pringle, president of National Education Association, left, and Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, right, during a virtual thank you event for educators with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)

"Being your first lady has been the honor of my life. But being your colleague has been the work of my life," she said. "Last Thursday, I taught my last class of the semester and my final class ever at Northern Virginia Community College."

"I will always love this profession, which is why I continued to teach full time while serving as your first lady," said Jill Biden, who was joined on a sofa by teachers' union presidents Randi Weingarten, of the American Federation of Teachers and Becky Pringle, of the National Education Association.

Biden had taught English and writing at NOVA for 15 years. She is the first woman to continue her professional career outside the White House while serving as first lady.

The announcement comes as she and President Joe Biden prepare to leave the White House in a little over five weeks after the Democrat dropped his reelection bid after turning in a poor debate performance against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump over the summer.

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris succeeded Biden, but she lost the presidential race to Trump, who is set to be inaugurated to a second term on Jan. 20.

It was not immediately clear whether Jill Biden, 73, was retiring from teaching altogether. Aides had no immediate comment. Northern Virginia Community College also had no comment.

Jill Biden started teaching English and writing there in 2009 after Barack Obama and Joe Biden were elected president and vice president and they moved to Washington. She continued to teach there after Joe Biden's term ended in 2017, riding the train down from their home in Delaware.

Before NOVA, she also taught English and writing at Delaware Technical Community College.

Jill Biden started her career in 1976, teaching English at a high school in Wilmington, Delaware, before becoming a reading specialist at another high school. She also taught English at a psychiatric hospital while she pursued her second master's degree. She also has a doctorate in educational leadership.

She often said, "teaching isn't what I do, it's who I am."

Judge rejects Trump’s bid to dismiss hush money conviction because of Supreme Court immunity ruling

A judge Monday refused to throw out President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money conviction because of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling on presidential immunity. But the overall future of the historic case remains unclear.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan's decision blocks one potential off-ramp from the case ahead of the former and future president's return to office next month. His lawyers have raised other arguments for dismissal, however. It's unclear when — or whether — a sentencing date might be set.

Prosecutors have said there should be some accommodation for his upcoming presidency, but they insist the conviction should stand.

A jury convicted Trump in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. Trump denies wrongdoing.

The allegations involved a scheme to hide the payout to Daniels during the final days of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to keep her from publicizing — and keep voters from hearing — her claim of a sexual encounter with the married then-businessman years earlier. He says nothing sexual happened between them.

A month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that ex-presidents can’t be prosecuted for official acts — things they did in the course of running the country — and that prosecutors can’t cite those actions to bolster a case centered on purely personal, unofficial conduct.

Trump’s lawyers then cited the Supreme Court opinion to argue that the hush money jury got some improper evidence, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form, testimony from some White House aides and social media posts made while he was in office.

In Monday’s ruling, Merchan denied the bulk of Trump’s claims that some of prosecutors’ evidence related to official acts and implicated immunity protections.

The judge said that even if he found that some evidence related to official conduct, he’d still conclude that prosecutors’ decision to use “these acts as evidence of the decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch.”