(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Yesterday US Magistrate Judge Mark A. Roberts ruled that Hearst Media and reporter Ryan Lizza are entitled to know who is paying the bills in the defamation lawsuit filed by Rep. Devin Nunes’s family.
Thanks to a redaction failure, we know that the Nunes family isn’t ponying up the cash to fund this shitshow litigation over Lizza’s 2018 Esquire article entitled Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret. In fact, they claim to have been out of pocket just $500. So defendants filed a motion to compel discovery, arguing that they’re entitled to know the real party in interest, particularly in light of Rep. Nunes’s almost identical suit arising out of the same article.
Skills That Set Firms Apart
Legal expertise alone isn’t enough. Today’s most successful firms invest in developing the skills that drive collaboration, leadership, and business growth. Our on-demand, customizable training modules deliver practical, high-impact learning for attorneys and staff—when and where they need it.
If indeed the family is functionally a cutout for the congressman, then Lizza and Hearst will claim that the plaintiffs are limited purpose public figures who must establish actual malice rather than ordinary negligence to prevail on their claim. Moreover, in the highly unlikely event that this case ever gets in front of a jury, the defense would like to be able to rebut the David and Goliath narrative of a big scary media company coming to a small town to harass a family of Real American dairy farmers.
The Nunes family’s sparklemagic libelslander lawyer Steven Biss submitted an, ummm, interesting reply brief in which he fairly screeched that the redaction failure was actually a leak.
“Defendants either knew that the press would discover that the ‘sealed’ filings were improperly redacted or secretly told their colleagues about the leak,” he wrote.
Also this, emphasis original:
Meet Me At ILTACON: Opus 2 And AI Workbench
Swing by Booth 800 for a look at the latest in AI-powered case management.
The Court cannot condone Defendants’ unlawful behavior.
What will Defendants do next to avoid liability for the injuries caused by their defamation?
When will they leak again?
‘Kay.
Or, as Judge Roberts put it, “Plaintiffs’ resistance is extraordinarily light on legal reasoning that might support Plaintiffs’ objection. I presume from Plaintiffs’ discussion of relevancy that relevance figures in their objections. But nowhere in their resistance do they expressly assert the funding sources are irrelevant, much less engage with the issue.”
The judge observes that, “while Plaintiffs are adamant in their assertions that they are not coordinating their respective lawsuits with Congressman Nunes, they do not deny the existence of third-party funding.”
The court also notes that “Congressman Nunes and Mr. Biss have related litigation in this Court arising from the same allegedly defamatory article,” and thus it is “not merely a fishing expedition to inquire about the Congressman’s involvement in the financing of the instant lawsuit and his stake, if any, in the outcome.”
So now the Nunes clan is going to cough it up, at least for an in camera review, after which Hearst and Lizza — and maybe the rest of us who’ve been watching Nunes and Biss file garbage lawsuit after garbage lawsuit — will get to find out who’s behind this campaign of stupidity.
Inshallah.
Nunes v. Lizza [Docket via Court Listener]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.