Fox News legal analyst Alan Dershowitz shreds Devin Nunes’ frivolous anti-Twitter lawsuit: ‘He has no case at all’
Earlier this week, Rep. Devin Nunes of California filed a $250 million lawsuit against Twitter on the grounds that the social media giant failed to adequately monitor two parody accounts that were making fun of him: @DevinNunesMom (which pretended to be from his mother) and @DevinCow (which claimed to be from his cow). Twitter suspended the former, although @DevinCow remained active as of Wednesday, March 20. The California Republican is drawing widespread criticism for filing a frivolous lawsuit, and even Fox News legal analyst Alan Dershowitz believes the lawsuit has no merit.
During Dershowitz' Wednesday morning appearance on Fox News, the right-wing cable news outlet’s Sandra Smith asked if Nunes had a “strong case”—and Dershowitz responded, “No, he has no case at all, and it is wrong from a political and ideological point of view.”
Dershowitz elaborated, “If you don’t like what Twitter is doing, create an alternate company. If you don’t like what Facebook or any of the others are doing, the American way is competition. Look, a lot of people thought that the Democrats controlled the media, and along came Fox. Now, you have two sides presented. You can watch Fox, and you can watch other programs. That’s the answer. The answer is to create competing media.”
Smith asked Dershowitz if Nunes had a case when it came to “defamatory language,” and he responded, “No, because the law in the United States is you can’t defame a group. You can’t defame conservatives, you can only defame individuals. If you’re a public figure, in order to be defamed, you have to prove reckless disregard for the truth. It will be very, very hard to do.”
Dershowitz added that the legal fees in Nunes’ lawsuit against Twitter would be much better spent trying to build “alternative media companies, which can compete in the marketplace of ideas. That’s the American way.”
On Twitter, conservative CNN pundit Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (a NeverTrump Republican) has denounced Nunes’ lawsuit as “nuts” and “COW-ardly”:
This is nuts. @DevinNunes is suing in part b/c a parody account of a cow in Nunes’ ranch, is BULL-ying him, not COW… https://t.co/2YJ9lYuX10— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@Ana Navarro-Cárdenas) 1553096990
As of March 20, “Devin Nunes’ Cow” had 383,000 followers on Twitter, while Nunes’ real Twitter account, @DevinNunes, had 395,000 followers.
