Former President Donald Trump on Monday sued CNN for alleged defamation and is seeking at least $475 million in damages, the New York Times reported.

The lawsuit, filed in a U.S. District Court in Florida, claims that the news network tried to “taint” Trump by using defamatory language as part of a “concerted effort to tilt the political balance to the Left.”

“CNN has tried to taint the Plaintiff with a series of ever-more scandalous, false, and defamatory labels of ‘racist,’ ‘Russian lackey,’ ‘insurrectionist,’ and ultimately ‘Hitler,’” the complaint read.

In particular, Trump argues that he is entitled to hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages because of CNN’s use of the term the “Big Lie” to describe his “stated concerns about the integrity of the election process for the 2020 presidential election.” According to Trump’s lawyers, the term “is a direct reference to a tactic employed by Adolf Hitler and appearing in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” they continued.

“CNN’s campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander against [Trump] has only escalated in recent months as CNN fears [he] will run for president in 2024.”

Meanwhile, Trump himself is currently trying to postpone proceedings in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, an author who has alleged that he raped her in the 1990s. Her attorneys revealed in a Friday filing that they are expected to depose Trump on October 19.

Trump’s lawyer is requesting that the court either substitute the U.S. government as the defendant or halt proceedings altogether until an appeals court resolves the question of who the defendant should be since he was president at the time when he labeled Carroll a liar following her accusation. According to the Times, if the U.S. government becomes a defendant in the suit, it “cannot proceed, because the federal government cannot be sued for defamation.”

“The D.C. Court of Appeals’ forthcoming ruling will be case-dispositive and, therefore, it would be highly prejudicial and inequitable for Defendant to engage in time consuming and expensive pre-trial preparation—much less proceed to trial—until this issue has been conclusively resolved,” wrote Trump’s attorney Alina Habba.

Carroll’s attorneys countered by saying that the request only amounted to a delay tactic.

“This case began on November 4, 2019, and it could hardly be clearer that Defendant hopes to ‘run out the clock’ until he is elected president again,” Carroll’s attorney wrote.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Finance and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters.