Government

Judge Dismisses Nunes Suit Against Fusion GPS For Doing The RICOs

Bad week for Biss.

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(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In March of 2019, Rep. Devin Nunes sued a Twitter cow, the first salvo in a long campaign to smite his many enemies with hundred million dollar judgments.

It’s not going well.

The case against Twitter was dismissed. The Washington Post defamation suit was dismissed. The CNN suit was dismissed. The Esquire suit was dismissed. The McClatchy suit was withdrawn, as was the one against his own constituents for daring to point out that the congressman calls himself a farmer but hasn’t been engaged in agriculture for years.

Along the way, Nunes managed to make his razzledazzle libelslander lawyer Steven Biss famous — infamous, really — for his hilariously disastrous legal pleadings. Twice last week, Biss’s antics earned him a stern rebuke from a federal judge as they booted his wackadoo cases off the docket.

In the first, Biss represented the congressman in an absolutely bizarre suit against research company Fusion GPS, which itself became infamous for producing the Steele Dossier in 2015. Nunes claimed that Fusion colluded with the Campaign for Accountability to file multiple ethics complaints against him, and that this amounted to civil RICO, tampering with a judicial proceeding, intimidating him as a “witness” in his own congressional hearing (sorry, what?), and tortious interference with his right to get re-elected by a ten-point margin.

Spoiler Alert: It’s not RICO. It’s never RICO. A bunch of people who think the plaintiff is a braying jackass and say so at the same time do not amount to a “pattern and practice” of criminal conduct. On the plus side, U.S. District Judge Rossie D. Alston, Jr. simply dismissed the suit and declined to impose the requested sanctions on Nunes and Biss, so… let’s call that a win.

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Unfortunately for Nunes’ longtime aide Derek Harvey, U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett was feeling less generous. Harvey sued CNN in October over its coverage of the Ukraine impeachment scandal. The plaintiff didn’t deny that he worked with Trump’s team to gin up the smear campaign against Joe Biden and his son — the text messages proving it are already in the public record. But Harvey claimed to have been grievously injured by allegations that he took a trip to Vienna as part of these efforts, and so he demanded $30 million to make him whole.

So, how’d that one go?

“Plaintiff Harvey and his counsel unreasonably and vexatiously extended this matter in bad faith with the filing of a last-minute Amended Complaint which did not in any way seek to cure the deficiencies previously addressed by this Court,” Judge Bennett wrote.

The court further describes the case as simply another front in Devin Nunes’s fatwa against a free press: “Harvey’s suit is at heart, a continuation of litigation of Congressman Nunes with respect to media coverage of his own political efforts in support of former President Trump.”

So Derek Harvey joins the list of Biss clients facing liability for clogging the federal docket with crap SLAPP suits.

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This Court also specifically warned that such Amended Complaint would be subject to dismissal if the Plaintiff failed to cure the noted deficiencies. (Id.) Nevertheless, after the clerk’s office of this Court had closed and just hours before the deadline of midnight on March 4, 2021, the Plaintiff filed an Amended Complaint nearly identical to the original Complaint filed in this case and thoroughly discussed in this Court’s Memorandum Opinion. As the above analysis explains, the Plaintiff did not cure any of the deficiencies noted by the Court. The filing of such an Amended Complaint is the sort of bad faith courts have repeatedly found to merit sanctions under 28 U.S.C. § 1927 and the courts’ inherent power to sanction.

Womp womp.

Ah, well, at least he’s in good company.

Nunes v. Fusion GPS [Docket via Court Listener]
Harvey v. Cable News Network, Inc. [Docket via Court Listener]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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