FILE – Former President Donald Trump speaks at his Mar-a-Lago estate April 4, 2023, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
In a ruling replete with hints and insinuation that he would have preferred to reach a different conclusion, a federal judge has dismissed former President Donald Trump’s defamation case against CNN over a handful of statements regarding Trump’s post-2020 election strategy.
U.S. District Judge Anuraag “Raag” Singhal ruled Friday that Trump’s 2022 defamation case against CNN couldn’t stand, and he granted the network’s motion to dismiss the case with prejudice. Singhal, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2019, said that the comments made on CNN didn’t meet the legal standard for defamation.
Trump, who sued CNN for defamation in 2020 and lost, had sued this time over statements made by CNN commentators, editors, and hosts referring to the former president’s “Big Lie” about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. According to Trump, the comments were defamatory because they “create a false and incendiary association between [Trump] and [Adolf] Hitler,” leading viewers and readers to “understood that [Trump] would be Hitler-like in any future political role.”
Singhal said the case concerns “political speech of the highest order,” as it was about “reporting and commentary on Trump’s challenges to the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.”
But even if the statements were intended to “undermine Trump’s political standing,” Singhal wrote, they weren’t lies.
“Acknowledging that CNN acted with political enmity does not save this case; the Complaint alleges no false statements of fact,” the ruling says. “Trump complains that CNN described his election challenges as ‘the Big Lie.’ Trump argues that ‘the Big Lie’ is a phrase attributed to Joseph Goebbels and that CNN’s use of the phrase wrongly links Trump with the Hitler regime in the public eye. This is a stacking of inferences that cannot support a finding of falsehood.”
Singhal noted that Trump’s legal team had asked the judge to reconsider the longstanding ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, which established that a speaker must act with “reckless disregard” for the truth of a statement in order to defame a public figure.
Although stalwart conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has called for Sullivan to be overturned, Singhal said that until that actually happens — something Singhal himself has acknowledged should happen — his hands were, essentially, tied.
“This Court has previously written […] that the Sullivan case has no basis in and ‘no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution, and it baldly constitutionalized an area of law refined over centuries of common law adjudication,”” Singhal wrote in his ruling. “But any disagreement based on textualism is effectively moot for this lower Court once the Supreme Court has spoken. And even if Sullivan weren’t binding, the case appears to be looked upon with favor by a majority of various iterations of the Supreme Court over the case’s nearly sixty-year existence with ongoing expansion of the holding.”
After finding that the statements were “opinion, not factually false statements,” Singhal appeared to bemoan the current state of the average news consumer, suggesting that readers of yesteryear were more well-informed and took the time to fact-check news reports.
“[T]he reasonable viewer, unlike when [landmark defamation cases in the 1960s and 1970s] were decided, no longer takes the time to research and verify reporting that often is not, in fact, news,” Singhal wrote.
The judge went on to imply that members of a vaguely-defined “free press” rushed to report on another recent case of major significance — the Supreme Court’s “well written” ruling that race-based affirmative action programs are unconstitutional:
As an example, only one month ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a well written 237-page joint opinion with vastly divergent views in two cases known widely as the Affirmative Action decisions. Within minutes of the release of the opinion, the free press had reported just what the opinion supposedly said and meant although it was clearly impossible that the reporter had read the opinion. And of course, those initial news articles were repeatedly shared, commented upon and disseminated over social media and still to this day the reasonable viewer very likely hasn’t read the opinion and never will. This is the news model of today. It is far different than that in Sullivan which altered law that existed for 175 years and has spawned a cottage industry over the last 60. But this too is not actionable.
Singhal said that while he agreed with Trump that the statements on CNN were “repugnant,” a “reasonable viewer” wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — take them seriously enough to conclude that Trump supports genocide.
“Like Trump and CNN personalities Ashleigh Banfield and Paul Steinhauser, the Court finds Nazi references in the political discourse (made by whichever ‘side’) to be odious and repugnant,” Singhal wrote. “But bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact. CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people. No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.”
“Being ‘Hitler-like’ is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim,” the judge also wrote.
At the end of the ruling, Singhal again stated his opinion of the CNN comments, indicating that he would rule differently if he could, but that under current defamation law, his hands are essentially tied.
“CNN’s statements while repugnant, were not, as a matter of law, defamatory,” he wrote. “The case will, therefore, be dismissed with prejudice.”
In a footnote, Singhal implied that he would have considered letting Trump amend his complaint — if he had only asked.
“A district court is not required to grant a plaintiff leave to amend his complaint sua sponte when the plaintiff, who is represented by counsel, never filed a motion to amend nor requested leave to amend before the district court,” the judge wrote.
Read Singhal’s ruling, below.
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