(CNN) — President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times is meritless, according to half a dozen lawyers and First Amendment scholars who spoke with CNN.

But Trump’s chances in court are almost beside the point, some of the experts said, because the president seems to want a political rather than legal or financial victory.

Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School, said the 85-page suit “is a statement of contempt for truth, the American public, the judicial process, and everything that deserves our respect in the American tradition.”

However, Tushnet said, “to pick through its legal defects, such as the complaints about statements about Fred Trump — a deceased man who cannot be defamed — is to ignore its purpose: to thr

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