Devin Nunes suffers defeat as Trump-appointed judge tosses latest libel suit
Former Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) suffered a defeat in court on Tuesday after a judge threw out libel suits he and his relatives filed over a 2018 Esquire article alleging his family employs undocumented workers on their dairy farm, POLITICO reported.
"U.S. District Court Judge C.J. Williams ruled Tuesday that the claims at issue in writer Ryan Lizza’s story — 'Devin Nunes’s Family Farm is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret' — were essentially accurate. The judge said that conclusion was fatal to the suits brought by Nunes, his relatives and the company used to operate the dairy, NuStar Farms," reported Josh Gerstein. "'The assertion that NuStar knowingly used undocumented labor is substantially, objectively true,' wrote Williams, an appointee of former President Donald Trump."
"In the 101-page opinion issued Tuesday, Williams said evidence developed during the litigation showed that the farm employed numerous workers who provided names and Social Security numbers that did not match Social Security Administration records," said the report. "'This Court ordered the SSA to verify the SSNs of all disclosed NuStar Farms employees,” Williams said. “Of those employees who NuStar plaintiffs employed on or before September 30, 2018, 243 of 319 employees’ names, dates of birth, and SSNs did not match SSA records.' Williams also said there was testimony and evidence that the farm was warned about such mismatches, accepted expired credentials and did not properly complete forms designed to verify that workers were authorized to work in the U.S."
Nunes, who became a popular villain of liberal activists in 2017 due to his use of congressional committee powers to help former President Donald Trump, filed a series of lawsuits against several critics, including a parody Twitter account going by the name "Devin Nunes' Cow."
He also sued The Washington Post, which similarly ended in failure.
Nunes announced in 2021 he was resigning from Congress to take up a leadership position at Trump's Twitter-clone social media platform Truth Social.
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