Devin Nunes Sues NBCUniversal & Rachel Maddow For Defamation

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California) has filed a defamation lawsuit against NBCUniversal and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for the anchor’s comments about his contacts with an alleged Russian agent.

“MSNBC and Maddow harbor an institutional hostility, hatred, extreme bias, spite and ill-will towards plaintiff due to plaintiff’s emergence as the most prominent skeptic in Congress of Maddow’s marquee news narrative from 2017 to 2019: that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to hack the 2016 presidential elections,” Nunes’ lawyers said in the complaint.

The lawsuit specifically mentions Maddow’s March 18 commentary, in which she argued that Nunes might have conspired with a suspected Russian agent to support the 2016 election for the former President Donald Trump.

“Congressman Nunes has refused to answer questions about what he received from Andriy Derkach. He has refused to show the contents of the package to other members of the intelligence community,” Maddow said back in March, per lawsuit.

“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.”

In his lawsuit, Nunes has also complained about how MSNBC’s host further attacked him on her social media.

“How do Republicans keep Devin Nunes on as the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee given his unexplained interactions with Andriy Derkach?” Maddow tweeted back in March.

MSNBC is not the only media platform that Nunes has sued, as he has also waged two other unsuccessful lawsuits against CNN and Twitter.

In fact, his lawsuit against Twitter in 2019 only backfired as the satirical account @DevinNunesCow, the very reason for his lawsuit, gained more followers after the news coverage of the lawsuit.

Nunes then accused Twitter of negligence for allowing this to happen without any intervention.

MSNBC refused to comment on Nunes’ lawsuit.

Article by Dongyoon Shin