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He did consult with attorneys. Or else who other than one of his attorneys filed the court papers?
Given the difficulty of proving defamation in the US (touched on downthread), even if the letter is absolutely fake it's extremely unlikely that Trump will be able to make a pleading that survives contact with the court. Meaning that his lawsuit will likely be dismissed immediately as a matter of law, without proceeding to any fact finding or depositions. It will likely end with Trump yet again screeching at the liberal judge who nuked his lawsuit, even though that nuking is completely and entirely justified. I don't think Trump really has much to gain here, except maybe by showing his "sincerity" by doing everything he can to "prove" that the letter is fake.
It's amazingly hard to prove a counterfactual. Even if Trump has the feds release literally everything they have on Epstein, that doesn't prove that the letter the WSJ has allegedly seen (BTW nobody else has ever seen it) is a fake.
In fact I wonder why the WSJ didn't leak the actual letter. The WSJ reporter saw the alleged letter and was able to transcribe its entire text, yet they couldn't release an image of the letter? My guess is that it's a shoddy fake and that if the internet got to see the letter itself then the charade would fall apart immediately. But if the WSJ "journalist" puts his head in the sand and turns off his brain, they can legitimately say they had no idea it was fake.
The idea that the WSJ wouldn't have the resources to make a decently convincing letter seems weak though. Some sort of legal strategy or source protection makes sense.
It's also possible that they don't even have a copy of it itself, like if a whistleblower snuck the paper out of the files, showed the journalist, and then snuck it back in and they don't want to leave any hard evidence behind the security violations while still getting the info out. Hell maybe even a journalist got snuck in to see the files directly, but that's unlikely.
If they actually made the letter themselves then there's a remote but real chance they get sued into oblivion and back. But if some "anonymous source" provides the letter then wsj is in the clear even if the letter is quite easily identified as fake under detailed investigation.
If the letter is real, transcribing it and publishing that is still absolute proof that a security breach occurred. I don't see how posting the text but not an image covers any source's butt more.
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