(NRCC News) – The people over at NBCUniversal are probably weeping profusely after it was announced that a judge has now cleared a path for former GOP congressman and passionate Trump ally Devin Nunes to file a lawsuit against them over some whoppers told by host Rachel Maddow concerning his alleged ties to Russian agents.
Why does it seem like every person on the left thinks conservative politicians are connected and/or working with Russian spies? Especially when it was Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat, who was having sexual relations with a Chinese communist spy? After all, the left’s ideology has a lot more in common with the authoritarianism of Russia than conservative belief does.
“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 said, going on to add 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.”
The Western Journal’s Isa Cox wrote, “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.”
It’s important to note that Maddow is not actually named as a defendant in the lawsuit, however, it is her comments about how Nunes “refused to turn over” the package received from Derkach “to the FBI” that might end up landing NBCUniversal in deep, deep trouble if things go the former congressman’s way.
“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 remarked during the March 2021 segment, which is quoted in the suit.
Nunes and his legal team are accusing MSNBC and Maddow of knowing that he had 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 the piece published by 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 stated in agreement in the 22-page ruling, clearing a path for Nunes’ lawsuit to move forward.
The judge presiding over the matter also affirmed that the package mentioned by Maddow during her show was “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.”
This isn’t the first lawsuit that Nunes, who resigned from Congress in the early part of the year in order to become the chief executive of Trump Media & Technology Group, has filed. He filed a number of these suits against media outlets for defamation, attempting to hold the mainstream news producers accountable for the information they push out to the general public.
While he was in Congress, Nunes was a key ally for former President Donald Trump, going all the way back to the beginning of the whole Russian collusion nonsense, when he was one of the first GOP lawmakers to raise legitimate concerns about where the notorious dossier, which was the foundation of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, came from.
Cox wrote, “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.”
She then added, “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?”
Nicholas Sandmann, the victim in that particular incident, ended up being awarded $250 million, but not before the photographs of his face were plastered all over the place and connected to the fake news narrative that he harassed an 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,” Cox noted.
Then presidential candidate Joe Biden actually included a photo of Rittenhouse in a little montage of examples of white supremacists that he and the media claimed were a dire threat to the country. Of course, Rittenhouse is no white supremacist and that’s become abundantly clear over the course of the last several years.
It’s time for conservatives to legally fight back against the mainstream media and hold them accountable for what they share on their outlets.
Copyright 2022. NRCCNews.org
