Devin Nunes Lawsuit Faces Motion to Dismiss
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) filed a lawsuit against The Washington Post for an article that he says lied about his actions regarding Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The case is currently under consideration for a motion to dismiss filed by the defendant newspaper.
The article in question was published six days after the 2020 election. It said that Nunes made a “midnight run” to the White House in 2017 to access confidential documents that would support Trump’s claims that his campaign was spied on by the Obama administration. It also said that Nunes believed that Trump Tower was tapped during the campaign.
Nunes says that both of these claims are false. He says that he went to the White House to get the documents “during daylight hours” and that he did not believe that Trump Tower was wiretapped. The Washington Post posted these corrections after the suit was filed, but Nunes has pushed forward with the suit anyway.
Nunes’ lawyer, Steven Biss, says that the new report is more defamatory than what was originally said. Biss says that the corrected version of the article said Nunes was “was given access at the White House to intelligence files that Nunes believed would buttress Trump’s baseless claims of the Obama administration spying on Trump Tower.” Biss says this correction makes it sound like Nunes was trying to make up a false story to back up Trump.
The Washington Post attorney Nicholas Gamse expressed his view that the characterization of Nunes engaging in a “midnight run” was a small error and not enough to move forward with a libel claim, which says that someone is “disgraceful or unfit for his job.”
Biss says that the piece published by The Washington Post was revenge against Nunes since he revealed that Trump’s campaign in 2016 was not working with Russia, a narrative that The Washington Post was maintaining.
Biss referenced a case against The New York Times editorial page to support his proposition that Ellen Nakashima, who wrote The Washington Post article, should have known that Nunes did not believe that Trump Tower was tapped. Nunes’ lawyer says that Nakashima was a contributor to stories written in 2017 that discredited the idea Nunes believed the wiretapping allegation. In the New York Times case referenced by Biss, the court held that James Bennet, the editorial page editor at The New York Times, knew or should have known that the allegations that Palin was involved in a deadly shooting were false because he worked at a magazine that proved that these allegations were false. Gamse distinguished the two cases and rejected Nunes’ argument.
Biss had also filed a lawsuit against CNN alleging defamation of Nunes aide Derek Harvey and others in relation to a story involving Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and the alleged involvement of Ukrainian nationals and government officials in the recent presidential election. U.S. District Judge Richard Bennet said that this lawsuit was frivolous. Harvey and Nunes had said that CNN made 20 defamatory statements, but then cut it down to five. Even though the number of statements was reduced, Judge Bennet said that it still showed malice against the news network, and the judge decided that CNN’s request for $21,437 in damages was reasonable. “This Court determined Harvey and his counsel engaged in bad faith conduct in filing the last-minute Amended Complaint in this case, joining a ‘chorus’ of courts sanctioning one of the Plaintiff’s attorneys, Steven Biss,” the ruling stated.
“As this Court explained in its Memorandum Opinions dismissing both the original Complaint and ultimately the Amended Complaint, this case involves the allegations of a public official seeking to collect damages from a news organization for its coverage of the first impeachment of former President Donald J. Trump,” Bennet wrote regarding CNN’s request for damages. “In filing the Motion to Dismiss the Amended Complaint, CNN’s counsel thoroughly established that, despite the Plaintiff’s amendments to the original Complaint, the remaining five allegedly defamatory statements failed to meet each of the requirements of a defamation claim.”
Biss had been sanctioned by the Virginia State Bar and had been suspended from practicing law in 2008 for one year for “a deliberately wrongful act that reflects adversely on his fitness to practice law.”
We will see if Biss tries to push this case further.
