(PresidentialInsider.com)- Last week, a federal judge ruled that Republican Representative Devin Nunes can move forward with his defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post.
While the lawsuit could only move forward in a “stripped-down fashion,” the judge still allowed Nunes to proceed with his case.
This week, Nunes said he was expecting to eventually depose the Post as part of his lawsuit.
The suit is centered on an article that was published in the early days of the Trump administration. Trump claimed at the time that the Obama administration wiretapped phones located in Trump Tower prior to the 2016 presidential election.
The article in question was published on November 9 that said Nunes visited the White House “late at night” back in 2017, believing intelligence would “buttress his baseless claims of the Obama administration spying on Trump Tower.”
Following the federal judge’s ruling last week, Nunes told Newsmax:
“For the first time in modern history, I am going to be able to depose the Washington Post. I’m deposing them on something that goes back five years ago, so we’re just trying to track people down and hold them accountable.”
After the story was initially published, Nunes demanded the Post print a correction and a retraction. Last year, he filed his lawsuit against the Post as well as reporter Ellen Nakashima.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accused them of publishing defamatory statements about Nunes’ 2017 trip to the White House.
The media outlet has continued to say their article is “neither materially false nor defamatory.” They have also claimed that Nunes has “not plausibly alleged that the Post published the article with actual malice.”
The Post did update its article, posting a correction that reads:
“Correction: As originally published, this article inaccurately attributed claims that the Obama administration spied on Trump Tower to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), rather than to President Trump. Nunes has stated that he did not believe there had been any wiretapping of Trump Tower. This article has also been updated to note that Nunes says an incident known as the ‘midnight run’ took place during daylight hours.”
In September of 2017, the Department of Justice said it didn’t have any evidence that supported Trump’s claims that the Obama administration was wiretapping phones at the Trump Tower.
Despite all of this, federal judge Carl Nichols denied the Post’s motion to outright dismiss Nunes’ claim of defamation. However, Nichols did grant the Post its motion to toss the claim of negligence that Nunes was claiming.
In his opinion, Nichols wrote:
“Later in this case, Nunes will have to establish by clear and convincing evidence that, even in light of the corrections the Post did issue, it published its statements with actual malice. But for now, he has sufficiently pleaded that, in November 2020, the Post published its article with at least reckless disregard of the truth that it had previously reported,”
