Trump-appointed judges toss his 'meritless' defamation case against CNN

An appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss President Donald Trump's years-old $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, deeming it "unpersuasive" and "meritless," reports The New Republic.

Trump sued the cable news network in 2022, for using the term “the Big Lie” in its coverage of "Trump’s debunked claims of sweeping election fraud that supposedly robbed him of a second term in the White House in 2020," The New Republic writes.

“Trump has not adequately alleged the falsity of CNN’s statements. Therefore, he has failed to state a defamation claim,” wrote 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Adalberto Jordan, Kevin Newsom, and Elizabeth L. Branch in an eight-page filing.

“Trump’s other arguments are likewise meritless," the judges wrote.

Trump nominated both Newsom and Branch, as well as District Judge Raag Singhal, who first dismissed the case in July.

Trump also accused CNN of using “the Big Lie” to create a “false and incendiary association” between him and "Adolf Hitler, who originally coined the term in Mein Kampf," The New Republic explains, "But the lower court ruled that “bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.”

The panel of appeals court judges ruled that Trump’s argument was “unpersuasive,” because the term “Big Lie” did not "constitute a statement of fact," they report.

“This assumption is untenable,” the judges wrote, adding that "Trump’s argument hinges on the fact that his own interpretation of his conduct — i.e., that he was exercising a constitutional right to identify his concerns with the integrity of elections — is true and that CNN’s interpretation — i.e., that Trump was peddling his ‘Big Lie’ — is false. However, his conduct is susceptible to multiple subjective interpretations, including CNN’s."

This is the latest in a series of failed lawsuits Trump has issued against media companies reporting on his lies, including a $15 billion defamation suit against The New York Times that was dismissed in September.

“We have held that, by using ‘Big Lie’ to describe Trump, CNN was not publishing a false statement of fact. Therefore, whether CNN used ‘Big Lie’ one time or many is irrelevant to the question of falsity,” the judges said.