Justice Department lawyers asked a federal appeal court on Friday to replace President Donald Trump with the United States as the defendant in a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says he raped her in the 1990s.The lawyers filed papers in an appeal of a lower court Manhattan judge’s ruling denying the substitution in a lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, a columnist who in a June 2019 book described her encounter with Trump at an upscale Manhattan department store.The book excerpt…

This post was originally published on South China Morning Post.