Court reinstates Nunes suit over reporter's tweet

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Source: Politico

A federal appeals court has rejected Rep. Devin Nunes' defamation suit over a magazine story about his relatives in Iowa, but the court revived the congressman's claim that he was libeled when a reporter linked to the story in a tweet more than a year after it was first published.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a lower court judge correctly sided with reporter Ryan Lizza over the 2018 Esquire article, "Milking the System," about how members of Nunes's (R-Calif.) family quietly moved their farming operations to Iowa. However, the three-judge panel said that when Lizza tweeted out a link to the story late the following year, he essentially republished the story after Nunes had filed suit over it, rejecting what he said was an implication that the Iowa farm employed undocumented immigrants.

"The complaint here adequately alleges that Lizza intended to reach and actually reached a new audience by publishing a tweet about Nunes and a link to the article," Judge Steven Colloton wrote in an opinion joined by Judges Lavenski Smith and Ralph Erickson. "Lizza tweeted the article in November 2019 after Nunes filed this lawsuit and denied the article’s implication. The pleaded facts are suggestive enough to render it plausible that Lizza, at that point, engaged in 'the purposeful avoidance of the truth.'"

Colloton acknowledged that other courts have ruled that merely posting a new link to an old story doesn't necessarily constitute republishing it, but he said those decisions didn't foreclose the possibility it could sometimes be a republication.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/court-reinstates-nunes-suit-over-reporters-tweet/ar-AAOtz00?li=BBnb7Kz

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Oh FFS he's a public servant.

[PatSeg]

1. God, he just asks for public ridicule

What a whiny little baby.

[riversedge]

2. ....is also disturbing because it allows Nunes, a sitting member of Congress, to press on with his l

Nunes is nothing but a creepy crybaby.




https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/court-reinstates-nunes-suit-over-reporters-tweet/ar-AAOtz00?li=BBnb7Kz

......................

One curious aspect of the ruling is that it appears to open the door to lawsuits against anyone who tweeted or retweeted the original story with knowledge of Nunes' lawsuit, and to similar claims over members of the public or those with significant social media followings tweeting or retweeting stories after learning that the subject of the story is disputing it in some way.

If the decision stands, the suit would be returned to a district court judge for further proceedings. The appeals court decision did not find Lizza or Hearst liable for the retweet, but left those issues for the district judge to revisit.

Stewart said the appeals court's ruling is also disturbing because it allows Nunes, a sitting member of Congress, to press on with his legal campaign against his critics.

"He’s not trying to win money from these lawsuits. He just wants the pain of litigation to deter other critics from writing about him. I’ll admit, I’m hesitant to say even what I’m saying here because I don’t want to trigger a lawsuit from him," the professor said. "It’s an intimidation tactic that can make a person’s life miserable for a while, and he’s relying on that to curb honest criticism of his duties as an elected official."

[Dakota Flint]

3. The court composed of Republican appointees

2 by Dubya and 1 by the orange slobfather

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Can someone explain this?

It seems to say that the court found that the original story was OK, but tweeting a link to it after Nunes had sued was not. If they said the original story was libel, I could see they'd say linking to it was too; but if "a lower court judge correctly sided with reporter Ryan Lizza over the 2018 Esquire article", surely linking to it is OK too?

[onenote]

7. It's a bit complicated.

Nunes alleged both "express" defamation and defamation by implication. The district court ruled that he had failed to state a plausible case for either claim. The Court of Appeals agreed with respect to the express defamation claim, but concluded that the complaint was sufficient to state a cause of action for defamation by implication. Specifically, the court found that the article implied the existence of a “politically explosive secret” that Nunes had “conspired with others” to hide the Nunes family farm’s use of undocumented labor. Keep in mind that the threshold for stating a claim for relief is fairly low and the court's decision doesn't mean that, if brought to a full trial, Nunes would prevail.

As for the significance of the republication: the court agreed that there was insufficient evidence of "actual malice" in the original publication, that republishing the article after Nunes had filed his lawsuit alleging that the implication that he had conspired to keep the farm's location and use of undocumented workers a secret was false, gave rise to a sufficiently plausible argument for actual malice to allow the case to proceed to discovery. Again, no guarantee that the evidence will prove actual malice.

For the record, I don't agree with the court's reasoning, particularly on the republication issue.

You can read the decision here:

https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/21/09/202710P.pdf

[Nasruddin]

10. Blind test

If you encountered that opinion in some other form, say, an extracted version on the internet & you had no idea where it came from, would you consider it an interesting and valuable set of observations & reasoning, or a combo of gibberish & motivated reasoning?

Does the court's own opinion

But these decisions do not hold categorically that hyperlinking to an original publication never constitutes republication.
The complaint here adequately alleges that Lizza intended to reach and actually reached a new audience by publishing a tweet about Nunes and a link to the article.

not meet much the same standard? Here we are, we have a PDF of the opinion, with quotes of the original source of complaint & the tweet in question (but not well cited - presumably elsewhere). Maybe the opinion should be quoted and reposted everywhere for further deep consideration?

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. Thank you - the two parts of the of the original claim against the article weren't clear

from the reports.

[Calista241]

5. If i were the media, i'd be super fucking careful about this stuff.

Clarence Thomas is on record as wanting to review media liability, and with a 6-3 court, I fear what would happen if one of these cases made it to the court.

[stillcool]

6. I don't think 'careful' is the issue

Republicans sue over anything, but our media is already gone. Sorry state of affairs when a reporter for Esquire gets sued....not for the article he wrote, but because he retweeted it a year later. They don't need to be careful, they just need the final nails in the coffin.

[lagomorph777]

8. So he lost the original suit (i.e. didn't prove the story false),

But somehow, merely linking to that story is now a problem? Story is still out there to be linked to?

[onenote]

9. No. That is not what the court found.

There were separate claims of express defamation and implied defamation. Those claims were based on different statements about different things. The court agreed that the complaint failed to state a claim for defamation. But the court concluded that the claim of implied defamation was sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss. At the motion to dismiss stage Nunes isn’t required to “prove” anything. Indeed, the allegations in the complaint are taken as true for purposes of deciding a motion to dismiss.