By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
President Trump’s strategy of squeezing media companies to obtain fat settlements to pay for a flashy presidential library/museum he wants to build in downtown Miami has also been lucrative for a tiny Coral Gables law firm.
Brito Law PLLC was established four years ago by attorney Alejandro “Alex” Brito, who employs just three associates and three paralegals, according to the firm’s website. Since then, Brito has obtained a multi-million-dollar defamation settlement against ABC News and is representing the president in four other high-stakes lawsuits pending against The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Brito’s big score for Trump, and for himself, came in 2024 after ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos screwed up during a March TV interview when he said repeatedly that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. (In fact, a jury in 2023 specifically cleared Trump of rape but did make a finding of sexual assault.)
Four days later, Brito filed suit on Trump’s behalf for defamation in the Southern District of Florida. Some legal experts saw the case as weak due to the high bar of “actual malice” that Trump would have had to prove to win at trial.
But the case never got that far. In December 2024, just nine months later, Brito secured a Trump-approved $15 million “charitable contribution” from ABC News, owned by The Walt Disney Company, toward construction of Trump’s library and another $1 million to Brito PLLC to cover “reasonable attorney’s fees,” according to the agreement filed with the court. ABC and Stephanopoulos also issued a statement regretting the misstatements.
Federal Election Commission records show that in 2025 Brito PLLC was paid nearly $300,000 more by President Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America. The records say those payments were for “legal consulting,” but do not specify the cases or matters involved.
Using other lawyers, Trump also settled for $16 million a $20 billion lawsuit he brought against Paramount Global, parent of CBS News, regarding allegedly deceptive editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris when she was running against Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Those funds, too, were to go to President Trump’s library, according to the PBS News Hour.
BRITO AND TRUMP
Today, via Brito’s complaints, Trump is demanding enormous sums from other important media:
- $15 billion from the Times, several of its reporters and co-defendant Penguin Random House LLC for maliciously defaming and disparaging his “hard-earned professional reputation” in two articles and a book. The pending 40-page amended complaint was filed in October. That’s a much-slimmed down version of what Brito filed a month earlier. The original complaint was quickly tossed out by Tampa U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, who blasted it as unnecessarily bloated.
- $10 billion from the Journal and parent Dow Jones News Corp. and chairman Rupert Murdoch for publishing a story about a lewd 2003 birthday card Trump allegedly signed and gave to the late sexual deviant Jeffrey Epstein.
- $5 billion from the BBC for “a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump, which was published in a BBC Panorama documentary, that was fabricated and aired by the Defendants one week before the 2024 Presidential Election in a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.” More specifically, “the BBC intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021 (the “Speech”). The Panorama Documentary deliberately omitted another critical part of the Speech in such a manner as to intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said.”
- $3.78 billion from The Washington Post. Filed in federal court in Tampa, Sarasota-based Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (TMTG), operator of the president’s social media platform “Truth Social,” contends The Post, “acting in concert with a former employee…who had been terminated for cause, published an egregious hit piece falsely accusing TMTG of securities fraud and other wrongdoing, which was then amplified by WaPo on social media.” It added the “malicious statements…created an existential threat to TMTG and caused enormous loss and hardship.” The case was filed in 2023, Brito’s firm took over as TMTG’s lawyer on Oct. 23, 2025.
Brito also sued the Cable News Network (CNN) on Trump’s behalf in 2022 but ultimately lost. The lawsuit asserted that CNN’s use of the phrase “the big lie” regarding Trump’s assertions that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, had defamed him. He also claimed CNN improperly tried to tie him to “Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.”
Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, a Trump appointee, didn’t buy it. Nor did the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in November calling the suit “meritless.”
Florida Bulldog wanted to ask Brito about his work for Trump, and how he came to acquire the president as a client, but he did not respond to a phone call or questions emailed to his office.
According to online biographies, Brito was born in Miami in 1971. He was graduated from the private, all-male Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in unincorporated Miami-Dade County in 1989. He obtained an undergraduate degree in history from Florida International University in 1993 and earned his J.D. from George Washington University Law School in 1996. He joined the Florida Bar on Nov. 1 that same year, and married his wife, Alina, in 1998.
Brito joined Miami’s Zarco Einhorn Salkowski and worked his way up to becoming a name partner at the firm during his more than 20 years at the firm and before going out on his own.
Here’s part of what Brito wrote about his professional career on Brito Law’s website: “Alex litigates complex commercial disputes, franchise disputes and trade secret disputes in state and federal courts as well as arbitration proceedings throughout the country.”
Brito’s media cases aren’t the only heavy lifting he’s doing for Trump, according to court records.
Last month, Brito filed the president’s $5-billion suit against JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) and CEO Jamie Dimon claiming they unilaterally notified Trump in February 2021 – a month after the assault on the Capitol – that it would soon close the accounts of him and nine of his companies.
“Plaintiffs are confident that JPMC’s unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations, and JPMC’s unsubstantiated, “woke” beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views. In essence, JPMC debanked Plaintiffs’ Accounts because it believed that the political tide at the moment favored doing so,” according to Trump’s 26-page complaint alleging trade libel, violations of Florida’s unfair and deceptive trade practices act and two other counts.
Trump has a similar civil suit pending against Capital One bank in federal court in Miami since last June that seeks damages, but doesn’t say how much. It sometimes reads like Brito’s template for Trump’s lawsuit against JP Morgan.
“Capital One’s unsubstantiated, “woke” beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views. In essence, Capital One ‘debanked’ Plaintiffs’ Accounts because Capital One believed that the political tide at the moment favored doing so,” it says. Sound familiar?
TRUMP WANTS $10 BILLION IN TAXPAYER MONEY
Two weeks ago, on Jan. 29, Brito and his firm also represented President Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric and The Trump Organization when they sued the president’s own executive branch of government – specifically the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Trump’s unprecedented complaint contends that Treasury and the IRS failed protect their federal income tax information from being leaked to the press. “From May 2019 through at least September 2020, former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, who was jointly employed by the IRS and/or one of its contractors, illegally obtained access to, and disclosed Plaintiffs’ tax returns and return information to the New York Times, ProPublica, and other leftist media outlets,” the complaint says. Trump wants $10 billion in taxpayer money.
Brito filed suit on Trump’s behalf against his former “fixer,” attorney Michael Cohen, in April 2023. Trump alleged that Cohen had betrayed his confidences and spread lies about him. In October 2023, four days before Trump was set to be deposed, he dropped the case.
Brito’s association with Trump may be helping him attract other high-profile clients. Last year, Miami-based rapper Megan Thee Stallion, whose real name is Megan Pete, retained Brito and other lawyers to sue Milagro Cooper, AKA Milagro Gramz, who the assault, libel and slander lawsuit describes as a “well-known online social media grifter who traffics in false and sensational narratives.”
Brito PLLC also represents wellness doctor, Carlon Colker, in his defamation claim against a lawyer and former judge, Ann Callis, who allegedly made false and defamatory statements against him. Callis did that, the suit says, to try to obtain an advantage in her client’s claims of sex trafficking and sexual assault against the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and Vince McMahon. McMahon is the estranged husband of President Trump’s Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
Then there are the legal matters that Brito is handling for Trump’s family that remain outside a court of law. For instance, last Aug. 6 he sent a letter to Hunter Biden on behalf of First Lady Melania Trump demanding an apology and retraction of statements Biden made during a podcast interview the day before.
Specifically, Brito cited a You Tube video in which President Joe Biden’s son stated that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep.” Hunter Biden added he heard that tidbit from Michael Wolff, an author who has written several books about Trump.
Brito’s letter called Wolff a “serial fabulist,” asserting that his “lies” were published by The Daily Beast which after being contacted by Brito “issued an apology to Mrs. Trump and retracted the false and defamatory statements contained in the article by deleting it in its entirety.”
Brito gave Hunter Biden until 5 p.m. the next day, Aug. 7, 2025, to comply with Melania Trump’s demands or she “will be left with no alternative but to enforce her legal and equitable rights…including by filing legal action for $1 Billion Dollars in damages.”
Hunter Biden did not apologize. And to date, that appears to have been nothing more than an empty threat.
TABLES TURNED
Meanwhile, a similar threatening letter from Brito to author Michael Wolff on Oct. 15, 2025 appears to have backfired.
The letter demanded that Wolff, who lives in Manhattan, “immediately” retract, apologize and “make a monetary proposal to Mrs. Trump to ameliorate the harm that you have caused” with The Daily Beast article.
The offending statements involve Melania Trump’s alleged involvement with Epstein. Brito called the following two statements in the article “implicitly defamatory”:
- “In explosive tapes recorded by Wolff, Epstein alleged that Trump like to ‘F— his friends’ wives and first slept with Melania on his ‘Lolita Express.’”
- “Where does [Melania] fit into the Epstein story? Where does she fit into this, into this whole culture of models of an indeterminate age?”
A $1 billion lawsuit was threatened if Wolff did not respond by Oct 21.
That same day, however, Wolff turned the tables and sued Mrs. Trump in state court in Manhattan alleging that Brito’s “threat letter” was an attempt to muzzle her. He claims Mrs. Trump defamed him and invoked New York’s anti-SLAPP law for protection. [SLAPP is an acronym for a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, that is a suit that seeks to intimidate and silence critics. New York’s anti-SLAPP law allows those hit with such a lawsuit to recover attorney’s fees if they can show the SLAPP claim was made without a “substantial basis.”
“Mrs. Trump and her “unitary executive” husband along with their MAGA myrmidons have made a practice of threatening those who speak against them,” says the lawsuit. “These threatened legal actions are designed to create a climate of fear in the nation so that people cannot freely or confidently exercise their First Amendment rights.”
At the end of last year, Wolff’s case was removed to federal court in Manhattan where Brito has asked the court for temporary permission to represent Mrs. Trump there, along with attorneys from the large, international firm, DLA Piper.
But Brito has hit a snag. On Feb. 6, he filed a routine motion seeking the court’s OK. But on Monday, the clerk’s office notified him that his filing was “deficient” because the affidavit he submitted under oath attesting to good standing in Florida was not notarized. He’s been told to fix it before he can begin.
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