Donald Trump CNN Lawsuit Tossed – A federal court in Florida tossed former President Donald Trump’s lawsuit seeking $75 million in compensatory damages and $475 million in punitive damages from CNN due to the network’s coverage comparing him with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis with prejudice. The former president is barred from filing a similar suit in the future.
Donald Trump Lost in Court, Again
Trump filed the suit in October. The former president claimed that statements made during the 2016 election infringed his rights and did serious “damage to his reputation.” It suggested that CNN pushed the comparison with malice and had the intent of pushing him out of office.
District Court Judge U.S. District Judge Anuraag “Raag” Singhal ruled, “Trump complains that CNN described his election challenges as ‘the Big Lie.’ Trump argues that ‘the Big Lie’ is a phrase attributed to Joseph Goebbels and that CNN’s use of the phrase wrongly links Trump with the Hitler regime in the public eye. This is a stacking of inferences that cannot support a finding of falsehood.”
Singhal, a Trump appointee, examined five instances where the former president was either called a “Nazi” or compared with Hitler. He looked at a Jan. 25, 2021 opinion column by Ruth Ben-Ghiat that called him a “leader of authoritarian tendencies and intentions”; a July 5, 2021 column that likened Trump to Joseph Goebbels; a Sept. 15, 2021 CNN column that claimed Trump pushes ‘The Big Lie’; a Jan. 16, 2022 episode of ‘State of the Union’ that again accused Trump of pushing ‘The Big Lie’ about the 2020 election; and a Feb. 11, 2022 column by CNN Political Editor Chris Cilizza that again accused Trump of ‘The Big Lie.’”
Trump’s Claim Doesn’t Fit Florida State Law
Singhal examined Florida state law that says pure opinion is “not actionable” when it comes to defamation.
“’When applying state defamation law to public figures, the First Amendment imposes additional limitations.’ … The statement in dispute ‘must be ‘sufficiently factual to be susceptible of being proved true or false,’” Singhal wrote. “Next, “the statement must be actually false.” Id. Finally, … the statement must have been made with ‘actual malice,’ that is “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
The case involved First Amendment principles and the former president could not prove that the statements about him were false considering that they were pure matters of opinion that were not actionable under Florida state law.
Trump Challenge Libel Law Rejected
Trump has long been a critic of federal libel law and has called for it to be changed.
Trump called on the New York Times v. Sullivan libel case that has governed jurisprudence over libel law since 1964; however, Singhal ruled he could not do that because it is binding on lower courts and only the U.S. Supreme Court can do that.
“The problem is essentially two-fold … [T]he complained of statements are opinion, not factually false statements, and therefore are not actionable. Second, the reasonable viewer, unlike when Sullivan, Butts or Gertz were decided, no longer takes the time to research and verify reporting that often is not, in fact, news. As an example, only one month ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a well written 237-page joint opinion with vastly divergent views in two cases known widely as the Affirmative Action decisions.5 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,” Singhal wrote.
He continued: “Acknowledging that CNN acted with political enmity does not save this case; the Complaint alleges no false statements of fact … [T]he Court finds Nazi references in the political discourse (made by whichever “side”) to be odious and repugnant. But bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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