Third time’s the charm? The Trump campaign has filed its third lawsuit against a news outlet in a matter of weeks, the latest one against President Donald Trump’s mortal enemy CNN.
Fox News was tipped off to the lawsuit in advance. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, which is CNN’s home turf.
The Trump campaign’s senior legal advisor, Jenna Ellis, told Fox News that 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.”
“[T]he 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,” she added.
Indeed, the Trump campaign has sued The New York Times and The Washington Post in very recent days. Leaving aside the merits, The Washington Post lawsuit has already gotten a setback in the form of the judge assigned to the case.
As for the Times lawsuit, Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano has already said that it will fail. Law&Crime founder Dan Abrams called the suit “fake” during a Tuesday appearance on The View. National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy called the suit “frivolous.”
As was the case in the other two cases, the Trump campaign is suing over an op-ed.
Here, the allegedly defamatory op-ed was penned by Larry Noble, former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission. The headline: “Soliciting dirt on your opponents from a foreign government is a crime. Mueller should have charged Trump campaign officials with it.”
The Trump campaign says it issued a retraction request that was ignored.
The Campaign, through counsel, sent a written demand to CNN on February 25, 2020, to retract and apologize for the aforementioned false and defamatory statements. CNN refused. The Campaign therefore was left with no alternative but to file this lawsuit to: publicly establish the truth, properly inform CNN’s readers and audience (and the rest of the world) of the true facts, and seek appropriate remedies for the harm caused by CNN’s false reporting and failure to retract and apologize for it.
To support its allegations of general CNN bias against Trump and Republicans, the Trump campaign pointed to a certain Project Veritas exposé.
“This evidence includes, among other things, undercover video footage taken by the Project Veritas news organization in which CNN staff members admit on camera that CNN’s coverage is extremely biased against the Campaign, the administration, and Republicans in general,” the complaint said.
The campaign is seeking millions of dollars and a jury trial.
You can read a copy of the lawsuit below.
Trump campaign’s CNN lawsuit by Law&Crime on Scribd
[Image via CNN screengrab]
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