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Court Tosses Trump's Defamation Clownsuit Against CNN

Another one bites the dust.

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948267On Thursday, Donald Trump started the morning with a non-denial denial of reports that he was about to be indicted in DC. In the event, that didn’t happen — or at least not yet. Instead he got a superseding indictment in the Florida documents case. And then over the weekend, Judge Raag Singhal dropkicked Trump’s $475 million defamation suit against CNN for using the phrase “Big Lie” to describe the former president’s big lies about election fraud.

You love to see it.

Trump regularly files garbage SLAPP suits against the media, seeking nine-figure damage payouts. Even when he was president, he sued The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. Those suits, filed in DC, came to nothing. But since he relocated to Florida, Trump has renewed his efforts, suing the Pulitzer Prize board in Okeechobee County court for defamatory failure to revoke a prize, filing a $50 million defamation suit in Miami against his former fixer Michael Cohen, and suing Hillary Clinton and half of DC for doing THE RICO to him. That last one famously netted Trump a million dollars in sanctions, as well as a stern rebuke from Judge Donald Middlebrooks for a “playbook” of filing junk lawsuits and using them to fundraise and rile up his supporters.

But Trump plows on, hoping that one day he’ll luck into a courtroom with a jurist who feels like overturning New York Times v. Sullivan‘s actual malice standard for defamation of a public figure.

That day is not today, however, even with Judge Singhal, whom Trump appointed to the bench. Not that the judge wouldn’t very much like to do it!

Trump asks the Court to reconsider New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. See Complaint. The Court is unable to do that; the case is legally binding on this Court. This Court has previously written and quoted Judge Laurence Silberman that the Sullivan case has no basis in and “no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution, and it baldly constitutionalized an area of law refined over centuries of common law adjudication.” Tah v. Global Witness Publishing, Inc., 991 F.3d 231, 251 (D.C. Cir. 2021) (Silberman, J. dissenting). But any disagreement based on textualism is effectively moot for this lower Court once the Supreme Court has spoken. And even if Sullivan weren’t binding, the case appears to be looked upon with favor by a majority of various iterations of the Supreme Court over the case’s nearly sixty-year existence with ongoing expansion of the holding.

In a brief order dismissing the case, Judge Singhal took multiple swipes at the media, including for a supposedly shallow take on the Supreme Court’s recent holding gutting affirmative action.

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“Within minutes of the release of the opinion, the free press had reported just what the opinion supposedly said and meant although it was clearly impossible that the reporter had read the opinion,” he sniffed, adding that “those initial news articles were repeatedly shared, commented upon and disseminated over social media and still to this day the reasonable viewer very likely hasn’t read the opinion and never will.”

“This is the news model of today. It is far different than that in Sullivan which altered law that existed for 175 years and has spawned a cottage industry over the last 60,” he continues ruefully. “But this too is not actionable.”

But even Judge Singhal couldn’t find a way to rehabilitate Trump’s idiotic claims against CNN for airing commentators like the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat who liken him to the worst despots in modern history.

“There is no question that the statements made by CNN meet the publication requirement for defamation under Florida law. The next question is whether the statements were false statements of fact,” he wrote. “This is where Trump’s defamation claims fail.”

The court acknowledges that “the complained of statements are opinion, not factually false statements, and therefore are not actionable,” which he could have written six months ago when the motion to dismiss was fully briefed. But apparently it takes a while to tap out 11 pages peevishly decrying the media landscape and tut-tutting about stare decisis.

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Ah well, back to indictment watch.

Trump v. Cable News Network [Docket via Court Listener]

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

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