Judge dismisses Nunes’s defamation suit against Washington Post

A federal judge dismissed Rep. Devin Nunes’s (R-Calif.) defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post this week.

The dismissal is the latest development in a string of lawsuits Nunes has filed against major news outlets.

Nunes filed the lawsuit in March over a story published in the Post about a conversation Nunes had with President Trump about an intelligence briefing.

The article, titled “Senior intelligence official told lawmakers that Russia wants to see Trump reelected,” claimed that intelligence official Shelby Pierson told members of the House Intelligence Committee that Russia had “developed a preference” for Trump.

The story, citing a person familiar with the matter, said Trump “learned about Pierson’s remarks from Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the committee’s ranking Republican and a staunch Trump ally.”

The article claimed that when Trump learned of the analysis, he grew angry at then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire.

D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta sided with the Post on Thursday, writing in his ruling that the newspaper did not act “with ‘actual malice,’ that is, with ‘knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.'”

Mehta, an Obama appointee, noted the newspaper’s position that the article did not report when the president learned of the briefing from Nunes or how he could’ve “conveyed the information” to Trump on a different day.

Kris Coratti, vice president of communications for the Post, told The Hill, “We are pleased with the outcome.”

The Hill has reached out to Nunes’s office for comment.

Nunes, a staunch Trump ally, has filed multiple lawsuits against several media outlets and other companies in recent years, including CNN, Esquire and Twitter.

A federal judge ruled in June that the congressman could not sue Twitter over parody accounts that post in character as Nunes’s cow and mother.