Trump Now Suing CNN Over Opinion Piece on Russia

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You may remember that the Trump 2020 campaign is suing both the New York Times and the Washington Post for opinion pieces. Now they’re apparently suing CNN for the same.

Fox News reported this afternoon that the Trump campaign is suing CNN for libel over a June 2019 opinion piece penned by CNN contributor Larry Noble.

Noble’s piece, titled “Soliciting dirt on your opponents from a foreign government is a crime. Mueller should have charged Trump campaign officials with it,” says the following:

It would be a major mistake to let stand the Trump administration’s claim, echoed by most Republicans in Congress, that Mueller’s decision not to bring criminal charges is the final word and a stamp of approval on the campaign’s interaction with Russia.

The report makes clear that the “events could implicate the federal election-law ban on contributions and donations by foreign nationals,” and the decision not to pursue criminal charges was an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. It was not the result of Mueller concluding that a campaign seeking assistance from a foreign government is legal.

However, the Trump campaign’s actions after the report’s release should serve as a clear warning it has not ruled out inviting help from a foreign government.

Per Fox News, the lawsuit says, “The complaint alleges CNN was aware of the falsity at the time it published them but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign while misleading its own readers in the process… the campaign filed this lawsuit against CNN and the preceding suits against The New York Times and The Washington Post to hold the publishers accountable for their reckless false reporting and also to establish the truth.”

These lawsuits, as mentioned above, are all targeting opinion pieces. Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano, reacting last week to the Times lawsuit, said, “If it is an opinion, the case goes away because your opinion can be anything you want.”

“Even if a fact quoted in it, in the New York Times, is wrong?” Steve Doocy asked.

Napolitano responded, “Correct. Because it is opinion that he claims he’s aggrieved by.”

He added that he thinks the lawsuit will be dismissed.

Fox News legal analyst Mercedes Colwin more bluntly said on MediaBuzz this past weekend that the lawsuit against the Times is “DOA — dead on arrival.”

She told Howard Kurtz, “When you have a libel case, especially against an op-ed editor, the very nature of an op-ed is that it’s opinion. There’s lots of well-settled law that says when you are expressing an opinion, you are devoid of making a defamatory statement. So even when the president said at that press conference ‘well, they got the opinion wrong,’ by his own admission you’re talking and criticizing an opinion. The case law is very clear. When you express an opinion, you’re not actually making a statement that’s defamatory.”

Kurtz wondered at the time why Trump, through his campaign, would “want to open himself up to depositions and discovery on the Russia matter that’s now old news.”