Government

Devin Nunes's Superstar Libelslander Lawyer Sanctioned Again

So much winning!

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He’s baaaaaaack. Steven Biss, razzledazzle defamation lawyer to the stars, has busted into another news cycle like the Kool-Aid Man. Only this time, it’s Biss who’ll be gulping down a big, cold glass of CNN’s legal bills.

OH, YEAH.

Well, Biss and also his client Derek Harvey, a former military intelligence officer who seems to have broken bad after falling in with a bad crowd at the House Intelligence Committee. In his position as Rep. Devin Nunes’s righthand man, Harvey managed to implicate himself in the Ukraine impeachment scandal, cahootsing with Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Victoria Toensing in the back room of the Trump Hotel in DC to gin up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

In November of 2019, CNN reported that Nunes took a taxpayer funded trip to Ukraine to gin up dirt on Biden in late 2018, racing off after the midterms in an effort to hide the trip and expenses from Democrats, who would shortly take over the reins of the Intelligence Committee.

The reporting was very clearly sourced to Lev Parnas, who was not named in Harvey’s suit against CNN. The case was dismissed for failure to state a claim, and Harvey was given leave to amend his complaint to allege actual defamation.

And he did amend the complaint … sort of. Harvey does appear to have edited out eleven pages of howling rhetoric, but he unfortunately he did not replace them with reference to any legally defamatory statements.

U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett described it as “nothing more than a repetition of the original Complaint with no new material factual allegations” and held that “Plaintiff Harvey and his counsel unreasonably and vexatiously extended this matter in bad faith by filing the last-minute Amended Complaint, which did not in any way seek to cure the deficiencies previously addressed by this Court.”

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Is it good when the court calls your filing vexatious? Probably not.

Yesterday Judge Bennett imposed sanctions on Harvey, Biss, and local counsel Joseph Meadows in the amount of $21,437.50 in attorneys’ fees and $52.26 for costs and expenses associated with dropkicking the (barely) amended complaint. The court was particularly unimpressed with Biss’s argument that CNN’s lawyers should have just had a paralegal dummy up a one-page response saying “Eh, same as last time, Your Honor.”

Plaintiff’s local counsel, Joseph Meadows, asserts that CNN’s second Motion to Dismiss was the same “in sum and substance” as the Defendant’s original motion and that CNN “could have filed a one-page motion to dismiss,” incorporating by reference arguments in the prior motion. (ECF No. 53.) This argument is without merit. First, as CNN has aptly noted, “[t]he development of thoroughly-researched, well-written, and effective briefs are not excessive or redundant merely because the [other party] believes the memoranda could have accomplished the same task with fewer pages.” (ECF No. 56 at 2 (citing Xiao-Yue Gu, 127 F. Supp. 2d at 766).) Further, Meadows’ de minis argument only underscores the frivolous nature of the Plaintiff’s amendments to his original Complaint.

Judge Bennett notes that he’s “joining a ‘chorus’ of courts sanctioning one of the Plaintiff’s attorneys, Steven Biss,” citing the recent clusterf*ckery at the 4th Circuit where Biss managed to escape sanctions in his effort to prove that the Wall Street Journal defamed a Russian academic. He omits mention of Biss’s rousing success (AHEM) suing a Twitter cow, Fusion GPS (for defamation and RICO!), the Washington Post, CNN, Esquire, and McClatchy. Nor does he refer to Biss’s recent efforts on behalf of conservative lemonade aficionado Dan Bongino, which also resulted in an award of attorney’s fees.

Guess that’s what’s implied by “chorus.”

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If we ever get a federal anti-SLAPP statute, they should name it after this guy.

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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