Donald Trump suffered a legal defeat on Tuesday as the U.S. government reversed its earlier position that the former president could be immune from the writer E. Jean Carroll's $10 million defamation lawsuit against him.

In a letter to Trump's and Carroll's lawyers, the U.S. Department of Justice said it no longer believed Trump acted within the scope of his office and employment as president in June 2019, when he denied having raped Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

• Trump's lawyers had argued that he acted in his capacity as president when he said Carroll was "totally lying" to sell a new book.
• Carroll's lawyers had countered that Trump's comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that occurred years before he became president, and thus could not be part of his official duties.
• The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which issued the new memo, said it had "serious" questions about the scope of federal law concerning whether employees of the executive branch can be sued for defamation.

The department late in Trump's presidency had reached an opposite conclusion, which the Biden administration adopted to the surprise of some observers. The WH press department commented:

The president strongly believes that the Department of Justice should not have been involved in the first place. But the DOJ is an independent agency, and they made a legal conclusion.

What about the DOJ?

Its change of heart means it will not try to substitute itself as the defendant, effectively ending Carroll's case because the government cannot be sued for defamation.

The NLRB General Counsel, who prosecutes unfair labor practice cases, had argued that workers wore the attire in 2020 to make Black coworkers feel safe and supported amid a series of nationwide protests over the treatment of Black people by police. The General Counsel claimed banning the apparel violated workers' rights to advocate for better working conditions.