Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is now suing the Washington Post and columnist Shane Harris for $250 million over what he called a “hit piece” headlined, “Senior intelligence official told lawmakers that Russia wants to see Trump reelected.”
Nunes’ lawsuit, filed March 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post “for the purpose of using WaPo’s mighty pen to influence federal elections.”
The lawsuit claims the Feb. 20, 2020 article in question was “manufactured out of whole cloth” and “intentionally falsified the claims that Nunes told Trump that Shelby Pierson told Rep. Adam Schiff “Russia wants to see President Trump reelected, viewing his administration as more favorable to the Kremlin’s interests.” Nunes’ lawsuit denies he spoke with Trump about this.
iMediaEthics has written to both sides.
The Daily Beast noted:
“While the Post reported that Trump “erroneously believed” that the intelligence official also gave their “assessment exclusively” to House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), Nunes’ filing claims he “never told the President or anyone else” that the official gave an “exclusive briefing to Schiff.” It’s worth noting that the Post did not report that Nunes gave Trump that specific detail.”
The lawsuit continued:
“The defamatory gist of the WaPo Hit Piece is that Plaintiff lied to and deceived the President of the United States, which caused the President to become ‘angry at his acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, in the Oval Office, seeing Maguire and his staff as disloyal for speaking to Congress about Russia’s perceived preference’, which ‘furious response’ ‘ruined Maguire’s chances of becoming the permanent intelligence chief.”
Nunes is currently suing a few other news outlets for reporting on him. In April of last year, he sued McClatchy over Fresno Bee story. In October, he sued Esquire and reporter Ryan Lizza over a story about his family’s farm, and earlier this year, his family also filed suit over the article. Then in December, he sued CNN, alleging it is the “mother of fake news.”