Rachel Maddow is going to hate what’s coming.
Maddow will have to explain herself in court.
And a federal judge just made a massive ruling that is going to cost Rachel Maddow big time.
Devin Nunes just scored a major victory against the corporate-controlled media
U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Castel ruled that former Congressman Devin Nunes’ defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow can proceed.
In 2021, Maddow falsely claimed on air that Nunes received a package from a Ukrainian named Andriy Derkach with ties to Russia and that he refused to give the package to the FBI.
“He [Nunes] has refused to show the contents of the package to other members of the intelligence community. He has refused to hand it 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,” Maddow declared.
This was not true, as reporting in POLITICO, the Federalist, and Breitbart revealed that not only did Nunes hand the package to the FBI, but he also detailed the entire episode in a letter to then-Attorney General William Barr.
Judge Castel dropped the hammer on Maddow
The Judge allowed the case to proceed because Maddow did not cite any sources for her claim despite there being public reporting available on this incident.
Judge Castel wrote:
The speaker did not attribute the statement to any source, including the Politico article submitted by NBCU on this motion. The CNN article shown and cited on screen did not speak to the issue of whether Nunes refused to give the Derkach package to the FBI.
At the Rule 12(b)(6) stage, the Court cannot draw the factual inference that the speaker or others responsible for the segment had knowledge of the Politico article and based the statement on its contents. While it is plausible that the statement was made with knowledge of that article, the Complaint also describes why the statement plausibly could have been made with knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard as to the same. A court does not weigh competing, plausible theories of actual malice on a motion to dismiss.
Congressman Nunes turned into a bogeyman of the Left when, in his capacity as House Intelligence Committee Chairman, he helped lead the charge to debunk the Russian collusion hoax.
Critics allege Maddow’s smear of Nunes in 2021 was designed to feed her audience’s perception that all Trump-supporting Republicans were tools of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
And now Maddow’s conspiracy mongering could cost her big time.
US Political Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
