President Donald Trump keeps losing in his quest to revive a defamation lawsuit against CNN for the network’s use of the phrase “Big Lie” regarding his claims about the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump’s latest loss came Tuesday, when a full slate of judges on the Atlanta-based federal appeals court declined to consider his case.
The president had petitioned the full court after a three-judge panel rejected him in November. Two of the three judges from the unanimous panel ruling are Trump appointees.
The president appealed after U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, also a Trump appointee, dismissed his suit in Florida in 2023, on the grounds that the statements at issue were opinion, not factually false statements, and that Trump hadn’t shown CNN acted with “actual malice.”
Trump argued that CNN’s use of the “Big Lie” phrase was intended to associate him with Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda. But the appellate panel deemed his claim “unpersuasive,” calling his assumption that the term is clear enough to be a factual statement “untenable.” It called his other claims “meritless.” Tuesday’s denial from the full circuit court wasn’t accompanied by any explanation or dissent. Trump can appeal further to the Supreme Court, where at least four justices would need to agree to grant review. Last year, the justices declined to review an appeal from a Trump donor who asked the court to overturn the landmark actual malice standard, which public figures must meet to bring defamation suits.
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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