Government

Devin Nunes Steers Trump Media Company Into Dumpster Fire Defamation Suits

What's the definition of insanity again?

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Former U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy Testifies To The House Intelligence Committee On The Mueller Report

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In April, Devin Nunes’s wildly self-destructive defamation suit against journalist Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines came to an ignominious end with a federal judge ruling that his family did indeed employ undocumented laborers on its dairy farm. The former congressman’s family spent a couple weeks chasing Lizza around rural Iowa to stop him nosing around their business, only to get dragged into the case and forced to throw open their books in discovery. And now Nunes looks to be working that same magic for his new employer, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), with a pair of defamation suits against The Guardian and the Washington Post filed in state court in Sarasota County, Florida.

TMTG is in the midst of trying to take itself public via a SPAC known as Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC). But the deal appears to be seriously in jeopardy, with the SEC, FINRA, and the Justice Department investigating DWAC. There are also reports that DWAC’s recently ousted CEO Patrick Orlando, who met with Trump before DWAC’s founding, made it clear from the jump that taking TMTG public was the entire reason for founding the SPAC, a gross violation of SEC rules.

In March, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported that TMTG is under investigation for possible money laundering in relation to an $8 million loan from a company whose main business appears to be processing payments for webcam pornography in the former Soviet Union. In a truly bizarre complaint, Nunes sued The Guardian in his personal capacity, claiming that “Defendants published and republished egregious statements online and via social media (Twitter) that falsely accused or implied that Nunes engaged in or aided and abetted money laundering.”

Nunes is only mentioned in the article twice: once to say that he is the CEO of TMTG, and once noting his denial that he or anyone else at the company had reservations about the source of the loan. Nevertheless, the complaint insists “Defendants’ false criminal charges exposed Nunes to hatred, ridicule, contempt, distrust, and disgrace, and injured his business, reputation and occupation.”

Former TMTG executive turned whistleblower Will Wilkerson, a resident of North Carolina, is also a named defendant. State court in Florida has jurisdiction over Wilkerson and and The Guardian, which is headquartered in London, because … UNDERPANTS GNOMES!

Then last week TMTG filed its own defamation suit, this time against the Post, for an article which said the DOJ is investigating a $240,000 finder’s fee paid to an outside brokerage associated with Orlando for helping to arrange the $8 million loan. According to the Post, this fee was never disclosed to shareholders, and is also under federal investigation.

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“The Statements immediately conveyed a defamatory meaning to readers,” the complaint screeches. “The express meaning and defamatory gist of WaPo’s Statements is that TMTG committed securities fraud or aided, abetted and participated in improper acts designed to conceal material facts from the SEC and shareholders of DWAC, and that TMTG was being investigated for money laundering.”

On the same day that TMTG docketed the Post suit, DWAC filed notice that it was in danger of being delisted from NASDAQ due to failure to file a timely quarterly report, and that it had “identified an error related to the accounting for certain expenses in the previously issued financial statements as of and for the year ended December 31, 2022” and thus its financial statements from last year “should no longer be relied upon.”

Regular readers of this column will recall that Devin Nunes is a prolific filer of garbage defamation suits, against various news outlets, social media companies, and random Twitter cows. He’s usually accompanied on these outings by his clownshoes lawyer Stephen Biss, and indeed, Biss is along for these two suits, chaperoned by local counsel Jason Kobal, head of a two-lawyer shop whose website is tampaworkcomplaw.com.

The Guardian case is set for conference before Judge Stephen Walker in September, and the Post case has been assigned to Walker, but no hearings have yet been scheduled. So it may be a few months before we find out if Nunes can do for TMTG what he managed to do for his own family.

We’re all rootin’ for ya, little cowpoke!

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

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