President Donald Trump lost his bid to revive his defamation lawsuit against CNN for the network’s use of the phrase “Big Lie,” regarding his claims about the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden. The unanimous ruling came from a three-judge appellate panel on Tuesday, with two of the judges being Trump appointees.
U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, also a Trump appointee, had dismissed the president’s suit in 2023 on the grounds that the statements Trump complained about were opinion, not factually false statements, and that he hadn’t shown CNN acted with “actual malice.”
“We agree that Trump did not adequately plead falsity,” the panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit said in affirming the Florida judge’s dismissal. The three judges on the panel were Obama appointee Adalberto Jordan and Trump appointees Kevin Newsom and Elizabeth Branch.
Trump argued that CNN’s use of the “Big Lie” phrase was intended to associate him with Hitler and Nazi propaganda. The panel deemed his claim “unpersuasive,” calling his assumption that the term is clear enough to be a factual statement “untenable.”
The panel called Trump’s other arguments “meritless.” Rejecting his claim that the district judge unfairly limited the analysis to the statements in his complaint, the panel reiterated that “Big Lie” isn’t a factual statement, so how often it was used is irrelevant.
The ruling comes as the president has made it a second-term priority to cast himself and his supporters as victims in their failed efforts to subvert the 2020 election. He has used his pardon power and pliant Justice Department lawyers to do so. Tuesday’s ruling reminds us of the power of an independent judiciary, where, for good or ill, Trump’s appointees, like all federal judges, have lifetime tenure and aren’t subject to the president’s control. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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