Court Denies Rehearing in Devin Nunes Defamation Suit Against Ryan Lizza

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Correction: A previous version of this story said that the Nunes suit against Lizza had been rejected. A rehearing requested by Nunes was denied, but the case lives on. This story has been corrected and Mediaite apologizes for the error.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday denied a request by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) for a rehearing in his suit against reporter Ryan Lizza for sharing a story he had authored on social media.

The 2018 story Lizza authored for Esquire, “Milking the System,” including allegations that Nunes’ family had moved their farming operation to Iowa, and that they had employed illegal immigrants. Nunes filed a defamation suit over the story, but a court dismissed that case in August 2020.

But he filed a new lawsuit alleging that Lizza had libeled him by sharing the story on Twitter in November 2019, while the case was pending.

The court revived the effort from Nunes in September on the basis of that tweet.

“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 of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the court opinion remanding Nunes’ effort to lower court. “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.'”

On Tuesday, Nunes’ request for a rehearing by the 8th Circuit in the case was denied. His case lives on in lower court.

Nunes, a dairy farmer first elected to Congress in 2002, became the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee in 2015. The position brought intense scrutiny from the media during the Trump era, and prompted Nunes to become more litigious. He unsuccessfully filed similar defamation lawsuits against CNN over a story alleging he met with former Ukrainian prosector Viktor Shokin, and against Twitter over satirical accounts — “DevinCow” and “DevinNunesMom” — directed at him.