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Former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., applauds in the audience as former President Donald Trump announces he is running for president for the third time as he speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
A federal appeals court in Iowa handed Devin Nunes another loss in his defamation suit against journalist Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines over a 2018 Esquire article that said the Nunes family’s dairy farm knowingly employed undocumented immigrants after a lower court judge determined that the story was “substantially, objectively true.”
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on Monday affirmed the lower court’s ruling which granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, reasoning that the former Republican congressman-turned-Truth Social CEO and his family’s dairy farm failed to provide any evidence that the article caused monetary damage.
The former California congressman, who has waged numerous unsuccessful (so far) lawsuits over the years — perhaps most infamously against the Twitter accounts Devin Nunes’ Cow and Devin Nunes’ Mom — first filed suit against Lizza and Hearst in September 2019. The complaint alleged that Politico’s Lizza, then an independent contractor reporting for Esquire, defamed the congressman with actual malice and conspired to publish the “hit piece” headlined “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.”
A second defamation lawsuit was filed on behalf of the dairy farm itself, NuStar Farms, Anthony Nunes Jr. and Anthony Nunes III, Devin Nunes’ father and brother, on Jan. 16, 2020. The cases were consolidated in February 2022.
The plaintiffs attempted to show that it was defamatory of Lizza to write — and for Esquire to publish — that the Nunes family, which “owned and operated a dairy farm in Tulare, California for more than a century,” had “knowingly” employed undocumented immigrants, despite then-President Donald Trump’s hard-line stance on illegal immigration and the then-GOP congressman’s support for Trump and his immigration policies.
In the lower court ruling, the presiding judge found that Nunes and the farm likely knew that at least some of the farm laborers were not legally in the country.
“Despite the fact that NuStar plaintiffs legally needed to obtain verification from prospective employees through unexpired documents, they accepted expired cards, at least some of which explicitly stated when they expired,” Williams wrote. “For instance, the state identification card one worker presented to them had an expiration date on it, as did some of the resident cards and permanent resident cards.”
In affirming the lower court’s ruling, the panel reiterated that Nunes had claimed the article “impaired his future career opportunities, impacted his ability to raise funds, and damaged his election campaign for Congress in 2018.” However, the court then emphasized that Nunes won his 2018 reelection campaign and accumulated more than double the amount of money from donations in the two years after the article was published (over $26 million) than the two years prior to its publication (nearly $13 million).
The court further found that the Esquire article didn’t appear to harm Nunes’ employment prospects.
“Nunes also failed to present sufficient evidence that the article impaired his prospects for employment,” the ruling states. “The only evidence regarding Nunes’s employment shows that after he retired from Congress, he became the chief executive officer of Trump Media & Technology Group, Corp., with a starting salary of $750,000. The job, Nunes admits, was secured ‘based on the strength of Congressman Nunes’s reputation.’ Nunes thus did not produce evidence to support his allegation that he suffered economic loss as a result of the article.”
The panel similarly tossed the dairy farm’s case, noting that the establishment also did not provide the court with any proof that it suffered financial or reputational losses aside from claiming that one unnamed person stopped doing business with the farm as a result of the article.
“But the NuStar plaintiffs failed to produce evidence that the suggested business relationship existed, let alone that the other party discontinued the association. This bare assertion of lost business is insufficient to establish a cognizable injury,” the panel wrote. “Because they presented no evidence of a preexisting good reputation that could have been damaged by the article, the NuStar plaintiffs failed to create a genuine dispute for trial about whether they suffered a cognizable injury.”
