A judge has cleared the way for former Republican congressman and close Trump ally Devin Nunes to sue NBCUniversal over seemingly brazen false comments made by host Rachel Maddow about his supposed ties to Russian agents.
The incident stems back to 2021, when the cable personality claimed that Nunes refused to hand over a package to the FBI that he’d received from Andriy Derkach, “a Ukrainian legislator with ties to Russian officials and intelligence services,” in 2020 when Nunes was still serving as ranking member to the House Intelligence Committee, according to the ruling.
In other news, by 2021, Rachel Maddow had apparently yet to come up with something other than “muh Trump Russia” with which to spice up her broadcasts.
“MSNBC and Maddow had no source that had told them prior to publication of the Statements that Plaintiff had ‘refused’ to turn over the Derkach package to the FBI,” the ruling stated, adding that Maddow “provided no source for the defamatory Statements about Plaintiff because, in truth, Maddow fabricated the Statements, including the story that Plaintiff ‘refused’ to turn over the package to the FBI.”
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in Manhattan said Nunes “plausibly allege[d] actual malice” against NBCUniversal, the parent company of “The Rachel Maddow Show” network MSNBC, Reuters reported.
Maddow is not named as a defendant in the suit, but it is her claims that Nunes “refused to turn over” the package from Derkach “to the FBI” that could land NBCUniversal in hot water if the suit turns out in the Trump ally’s favor.
“Congressman Nunes has refused to answer questions about what he received from Andriy Derkach. He has refused to show the contents of the package to other members of the intelligence community. He has refused to hand it over to the FBI, which is what you should do if you get something from somebody who is sanctioned by the U.S. as a Russian agent,” she said during the March 2021 segment, as quoted in the suit.
Nunes and his attorneys accuse MSNBC and Maddow of having known that he’d done no such thing and of having “set out to inflict maximum pain and suffering on plaintiff in order to harm plaintiff’s reputation,” according to Reuters.
“A reasonable viewer could plausibly understand the speaker to assert that Nunes ‘refused’ [to] turn over the Derkach package to the FBI. A reasonable viewer could conclude that such conduct is significantly more serious than what was suggested in the Committee proceeding,” Castel agreed in his 22-page ruling, paving the way for Nunes lawsuit to move forward.
The judge also affirmed that the package in question was instead “handled solely by Nunes’ staff and delivered, unopened, to the offices of the FBI. That same day, Nunes sent a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr advising him of the receipt of the package.”
Nunes, who resigned from Congress earlier this year to become the chief executive of Trump Media & Technology Group, has filed a number of lawsuits against media outlets contending defamation.
During his time in Congress, Nunes served as a key Trump ally stemming back to the early days of the Trump-Russia scandal, when he was one of the first Republican lawmakers to raise what would turn out to be completely legitimate concerns about the origins of the notorious dossier on which Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation would be based.
Like so many figures that served as an easy target to the rabidly anti-conservative establishment media complex, it’s easy to believe that Nunes was certainly the victim of malicious defamation aimed at hurting his reputation, an attack based entirely upon the fact that by so doing, Maddow could strike yet another blow at the Big Bad Orange Man — Donald Trump.
Who can forget when The Washington Post jumped all over the story of a group of MAGA-hatted teenagers taunting a Native American activist, entirely forgetting that the journalistic integrity that its slogan hints at will keep democracy alive, in order to get a good smack at Trump supporters?
With regards to that egregious case of media malfeasance, victim Nicholas Sandmann got his due — to the tune of $250 million, but not before the image of his face would forever be cemented in the minds of millions of Americans as the boy who taunted an innocent old man.
After all, consider how the media treated Kyle Rittenhouse, who will no doubt get his day in court as well, yet he is still firmly established to those who defer to the authority of supposedly non-partisan legacy media outlets that so clearly operate with a distinct, intentional bias as a racist, white nationalist who slaughtered innocent Black Lives Matter protesters in cold blood.
So much so, that then-presidential candidate Joe Biden even included an image of Rittenhouse among a montage of examples of the supposedly urgent threat of white supremacists, and the media, naturally, hardly made even a whiff of a fuss in the manner they would have done if the Trump campaign committed a similar offence.
Well, Biden, like the media outlets that so frequently serve as the PR wing for his party, is not above the law, and he might find himself facing lawsuits from Rittenhouse as well.
The damage may already have been done, but that doesn’t mean that these outlets shouldn’t still be held responsible for their shameless lack of journalistic integrity.
They’ve been getting away with it all for far too long.
CORRECTION, Dec. 1, 2022: An earlier version of this article included an incorrect reference to Devin Nunes’ former position in Congress. He was ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
