Appeals Court Rejects Donald Trump’s Attempt To Revive Lawsuit Against CNN

A federal appeals court rejected Donald Trump‘s effort to revive a defamation lawsuit against CNN, concluding that he has not “adequately alleged” the falsity of the network’s references to his stolen 2020 election claims as “the Big Lie.”

The three-judge appellate panel upheld a lower court’s 2023 dismissal of the case.

Trump had argued in his lawsuit, filed in federal court in Florida in 2022, that the references to the phrase were defamatory as they created a “false and incendiary association” between him and Adolf Hitler.

“Trump’s argument is unpersuasive,” the appellate judges wrote. “First, although he concedes that CNN’s use of the term ‘Big Lie’ is, to some extent, ambiguous, he assumes that it is unambiguous enough to constitute a statement of fact. This assumption is untenable.”

The judges wrote that Trump’s “argument hinges on the fact that his own interpretation of his conduct—i.e., that he was exercising a constitutional right to identify his concerns with the integrity of elections—is true and that CNN’s interpretation—i.e., that Trump was peddling his ‘Big Lie’—is false. However, his conduct is susceptible to multiple subjective interpretations, including CNN’s.”

Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit cited five examples of the use of the term “The Big Lie” or election lies that Trump’s attorneys said the network refused to retract.

In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal wrote that CNN’s references to the term “the Big Lie” were matters of opinion, not fact.

The judge wrote, “Trump complains that CNN described his election challenges as ‘the Big Lie.’ Trump argues that ‘the Big Lie’ is a phrase attributed to Joseph Goebbels and that CNN’s use of the phrase wrongly links Trump with the Hitler regime in the public eye. This is a stacking of inferences that cannot support a finding of falsehood.”