Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was widely mocked on Monday after Fox News reported he was suing his hometown newspaper for $150 million over a story titled, “A yacht, cocaine, prostitutes: Winery partly owned by Nunes sued after fundraiser event.”
One particularly embarrassing error in the lawsuit was discovered by LA Times national correspondent Matt Pearce.
In a section of the lawsuit discussing a tweet by former Fresno Bee reporter Mackenzie Mays, the authors made a major mistake.
The lawsuit includes a picture of the tweet, showing three words bolded. The accompanying text reads, “In her tweet, Mays chose to emphasize the words “woman”, “Devin” and “cocaine”.
The problem is, Twitter does not allow a user to emphasize words with bolding. It seems Nunes’ lawyers did a keyword search for those terms, then took a picture of the response with their keywords bolded.
Indeed, the original tweet by Mays did not included bolding of the words as the lawsuit claimed.
Pearce’s analysis was retweeted by the account Devin Nunes’ cow, which has 634,000 followers.
Here is what some people were saying about the competence of Nunes’ legal team.