Judge: US can’t replace Trump in columnist’s slander suit

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday denied President Donald Trump’s request that he be replaced as the defendant in a defamation lawsuit alleging he raped a woman in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. The decision by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came after the Justice Department argued that the United States — and by extension U.S. taxpayers — should replace Trump as the defendant in a lawsuit filed by the columnist E. Jean…