Devin Nunes throws out own appeal in Washington Post suit over Trump Tower wiretapping claims dismissing defamation case

Source: Law & Crime

Oct 2nd, 2024, 1:05 pm


After Republican former U.S. representative for California Devin Nunes‘ long-running defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post suffered a damaging blow in June when the trial judge tossed what was left of the case, it seemed that he was prepared to avail himself of the appellate process to the end. A notice that hit the D.C. Circuit docket on Tuesday confirmed, however, that the case is permanently over. Lawyers for Nunes and the Post have agreed to cover their own costs in an agreement that the case be “voluntarily dismissed with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be brought again.

The defamation case arose just a week after the Post published Ellen Nakashima’s Nov. 9, 2020, article “White House official and former GOP political operative Michael Ellis named as NSA general counsel,” telling of the then congressman’s reported 2017 “midnight run” and attributing statements to Nunes that the Obama administration “spied” on — wiretapped — Donald Trump and his associates in Trump Tower.

Nunes had countered that he “never made the ‘baseless’ claim – or any claim – that the Obama administration spied on Trump Tower” and that he instead “said the exact opposite – that there was no evidence of any wiretap on Trump Tower.” The former House Intelligence Committee chairman said Nakashima should have known his stance on the issue because, in the course of her own reporting from 2017, she wrote down notes with his denials. He also asserted the so-called “midnight run” — through which he “was given access at the White House to intelligence files,” as Nakashima’s report put it — did not actually occur under the cover of darkness.

Though the Post moved to issue a correction, Nunes claimed the fixes defamed him too, only slightly shifting language from “intelligence files that Nunes believed would buttress his baseless claims of the Obama administration spying on Trump Tower” to “intelligence files that Nunes believed would buttress Trump’s baseless claims of the Obama administration spying on Trump Tower.”

Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/devin-nunes-throws-out-own-appeal-in-washington-post-lawsuit-dismissing-case-with-prejudice/