POLK COUNTY, Iowa — 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.

“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist,” she wrote in a November op-ed. “So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings.”

Before the lawsuit was filed, Selzer told a local PBS news program last week that she took the allegations of election interference “very seriously,” but said she was "mystified about what the motivation anybody thinks I had and would act on." 

“To suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody, it's all just kind of, it's hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime,” Selzer said.

Trump, who has long had a hostile and litigious relationship with the press, also sued CBS in October for $10 billion accusing them of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris, a claim the news program vigorously denies. Last year, he sued Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward and book publisher Simon & Schuster for $50 million over the use of recorded interviews in Woodward’s 2022 audiobook “The Trump Tapes.”

While election law experts have said lawsuits like the one filed against Selzer are unlikely to result in victories for Trump — “I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” wrote Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, on Monday night — press freedom advocates and some Democrats have warned that even meritless lawsuits are intended to intimidate and damage journalists covering the president-elect and his incoming administration.