Devin Nunes has second legal setback in a week as Iowa judge joins his case with family’s
A federal judge joined former Rep. Devin Nunes’ lawsuit with one his family filed against the same media organization and journalist over the same story about the family’s Iowa dairy, NuStar Farms.
The lawsuits each contend that a story published in 2018 in the magazine Esquire, which suggested that Nunes’ family farm knowingly hired undocumented immigrants, defamed them.
But while Nunes is considered a public figure, his family is not, their lawyers contend, meaning that their cases should not be together.
Public figures have to prove that defamatory statements were made with “actual malice” — with knowledge that statements were false or with reckless disregard of whether they were false — making it more difficult for them to recover damages in libel lawsuits than private individuals.
It is the second recent legal setback for the former congressman. Last week, a federal judge in Texas moved Nunes’ lawsuit against the parent company of MSNBC to a New York court, where the congressman’s arguments were dismissed before.
Nunes and his family have shared the same lawyer, Steven Biss, in separate trials against Esquire’s owner, Hearst, and the journalist, Ryan Lizza, over their story titled “Devin Nunes’ Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.” The family is also represented by William McGinn.
The Nunes’ lawyers wrote that putting the lawsuits together would confuse the jurors over the difference between public and private figures — and that the cases were in different places for trial readiness and it wouldn’t be more efficient to do them together.
Lawyers for Hearst and Lizza, who now works for Politico, had wanted to join the lawsuits to heighten efficiency since the “claims, facts, and evidence in both cases is nearly identical.”
In his decision to join the cases, Judge Mark Roberts of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Iowa wrote that jurors have been asked to deal with more complex differences before and that keeping the cases apart would be a waste of resources and time.
“Here, there are undoubtedly common questions of law and fact, including, but not limited to, the truth of the allegations in the article about Defendant NuStar employing undocumented laborers,” Roberts wrote in his decision on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2022. “The parties have refused to estimate the possible length of trial. But even if trial takes only five days, repeating all or most of the testimony to a second jury would put a great burden on the Court, the witnesses, and the jurors.”
Lawyers for the Nunes family have argued that they did not knowingly employ undocumented labor. Nunes, a Republican who formerly represented the district surrounding Tulare in Congress, does not have a financial stake in the dairy, which is owned by his parents and brother. In his initial complaint, he said that the characterization of the story as a “politically explosive secret” was defamatory, and that Hearst and Lizza were acting as part of a conspiracy to harm his reputation.
Nunes almost lost his case against Hearst
A different judge in the federal Iowa court had previously dismissed Nunes’ case against Hearst and Lizza.
In August 2020, Judge C.J. Williams ruled that statements Nunes’ lawyers cited did not harm the former congressman, were opinions or did not concern him. Williams also wrote that even if statements in the story were defamatory, Nunes failed to prove that they were made with actual malice.
Nunes appealed the decision, where a three-judge panel reopened the case over a tweet that Lizza sent which linked to the story after the former congressman had filed suit. While the appeals court judges agreed with Williams that the story was not outright defamatory, Lizza’s tweet could be interpreted as republication to reach a new audience with actual malice.
Many first amendment lawyers and media organizations were puzzled by the decision, which ultimately led dozens of news outlets and individuals to file a brief in support of Hearst’s and Lizza’s ask for the appeals court to reconsider.
The appeals court denied the news outlets’ brief, did not reconsider and sent the case back to the Iowa court where Nunes’ family’s lawsuit was ongoing.
Neither lawyers for Hearst and Lizza nor for Nunes and his family responded to a request for comment.
Nunes’ most recent setback came in Texas
Nunes bore another setback when a federal judge in Texas moved his lawsuit against NBCUniversal to the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, against what Nunes’ lawyers had wanted. The former congressman is suing NBCUniversal over Rachel Maddow’s statements in a segment of her namesake show that tied Nunes to a Russian operative’s package.
Nunes lost in the Southern District of New York before. A judge there dismissed Nunes’ last case in which the former congressman sued CNN over a report that placed him in Vienna to speak with officials who were looking into political dirt on President Joe Biden. Nunes procured photos when he filed suit — originally in a federal court in Virginia — that showed he was not in Vienna at the time CNN’s source said he was.
The New York judge wrote that she dismissed the suit because Nunes had failed to ask for a retraction before filing it. Nunes appealed the decision.
Nunes has filed 10 lawsuits since 2019 against organizations and people whom he claims have defamed him. Among those that are ongoing is one against two anonymous Twitter users who parody a cow and his mother. Judges have dismissed several cases. Nunes has appealed several of those decisions.
He has continued in his legal pursuits after leaving Congress to become the chief executive officer of former President Donald Trump’s media venture. On his new website, Nunes claims that the lawsuits are one method he has pursued in pushing back on the “media attacks” against him.
This story was originally published February 2, 2022 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Devin Nunes has second legal setback in a week as Iowa judge joins his case with family’s."
