Judge says Devin Nunes can sue MSNBC. Where all of the former congressman’s lawsuits stand

A federal judge has ruled that former Congressman Devin Nunes can sue the parent company of MSNBC over a statement that Rachel Maddow made on her namesake show.

In a 22-page order released Monday, Judge P. Kevin Castel of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote that Nunes’ legal team can “plausibly allege actual malice” in Maddow’s comment about a package addressed to the congressman from a Ukrainian lawmaker with Russian ties.

Since 2019, the California Republican has filed 11 lawsuits against media organizations and individuals he claims have defamed him or conspired to harm his reputation. Judges have dismissed many of the cases, and Nunes has dropped some of them.

Nunes, who represented the area around Fresno and Tulare in Congress for almost a decade, resigned last January to become the chief executive of former President Donald Trump’s social media company, Truth Social. But the litigation has continued.

Here’s where all of Nunes’ lawsuits stand:

Nunes vs. MSNBC

In a March 2021, Maddow said that Nunes “refused to hand [the package] over to the FBI, which is what you should do if you get something from somebody who is sanctioned by the U.S. as a Russian agent.”

Castel did not rule whether the statement was made with actual malice, the standard that public figures must meet in defamation lawsuits to collect damages. Rather, he is allowing the case to continue on the one claim.

Castel wrote that Maddow did not attribute her statement. While she might have known about a similar accusation regarding the package from a Politico article submitted by lawyers from NBCUniversal (MSNBC’s parent company) the court does not “weigh competing, plausible theories” of actual malice while considering a motion to dismiss.

To prove actual malice, Nunes’ lawyers must show that NBCUniversal aired the statement while knowing that it was false or with reckless disregard as to whether it was true.

Nunes alleged that Maddow and the network knew that the package had been turned over and that they had intended to harm his reputation.

The complaint addresses other statements she made, but Castel found that those were not defamatory and granted NBCUniversal’s motion to dismiss them.

Neither attorneys for Nunes nor NBCUniversal responded to requests for comment.

Other lawsuits

Nunes filed suit against CNN and Jake Tapper in Florida last month over statements made he made during an October episode of his nightly show. Tapper denounced Republicans who proliferated conspiracy theories of a sexual relationship between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the attacker who broke into their San Francisco home and assaulted 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

Nunes has three other ongoing lawsuits: against a magazine and a journalist who wrote about his family’s Iowa dairy farm, The Washington Post and Twitter parody accounts of a cow and his mother.

The former congressman and his family originally filed separate defamation lawsuits against the parent company of Esquire magazine and reporter Ryan Lizza, who now works for Politico, after a 2018 story suggested that the Nunes’ family knowingly employed undocumented immigrants on their farm. Nunes, who is not a stakeholder in the farm, and his family have denied that they knowingly relied on undocumented labor.

His family filed a separate suit. A judge in the Northern District of Iowa consolidated the cases in February. It is scheduled to go to a jury trial this spring.

Nunes sued The Post twice. One action was dismissed, but he sued a second time in 2020 over a story that referred to a 2017 “midnight run” to the White House to get evidence that the FBI had been spying on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He said the “midnight run” never happened.

The Tulare native is still attempting to sue the anonymous writers behind “Devin Nunes’ cow” and “Devin Nunes Alt-Mom,” who heckle him on Twitter. The issue, his lawyer told the court, is that he doesn’t know who they are and cannot serve them.

Judges have dismissed lawsuits against the compilers of the so-called Steele dossier, another case against CNN and the other against the Post. In the same suit against @DevinCow and @NunesAlt, a judge dismissed Twitter and a Republican strategist as defendants.

Nunes dropped cases against McClatchy, which owns The Bee, and former constituents who had said the congressman was not a farmer. He also dropped an action against another former constituent whom the California Republican accused of once being married to the Twitter cow.