CNN is being sued, again.
Fox News reports that Alan Dershowitz, the renowned attorney and Harvard Law School professor, has brought a defamation suit against CNN in which he is seeking $300 million in damages.
Why?
It all goes back to President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.
The reader may remember that Dershowitz, as a Constitutional scholar, was a member of Trump’s defense team. The reader may also remember that Dershowitz, after delivering his argument against impeaching Trump on the Senate floor, received some heavy criticism.
Critics took issue with Dershowitz saying “that the President of the United States could commit illegal acts as long as he thought it would help his reelection and that his reelection was in the public interest.” Now, if Dershowitz said this and only this, the critics would have a point. But, he didn’t say only this.
The lawsuit
Dershowitz, during his argument, also said that illegal activity on the part of the president can result in impeachment. The problem is that if you didn’t watch Dershowitz’s argument, then it would be unlikely that you would know that he said this.
This is because networks, including CNN, only aired the first quote, and, Dershowitz believes that the network did this willfully, deliberately, and maliciously, in an effort to destroy his credibility as a scholar. This is what has led to the lawsuit.
“What CNN did here, and it pains me to say this because, you know, I have friends over there, What they did is, they just totally doctored the tape,” Dershowitz recently told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “If they had just shown the part where I said ‘if he does anything illegal he can be impeached’ — but they doctored the tape to take that out.”
“Of course I never said that — I don’t believe it,” Dershowitz added. “I spent an hour in front of the Senate two days earlier saying if the president commits a crime he can be impeached and that was a whole thesis of my presentation.”
Time to pay up
Dershowitz, with the lawsuit, is seeking $300 million in damages from CNN, although he told Hannity that “some good charities are going to benefit” from the lawsuit, suggesting that at least some of the proceeds, if he does win the case, will go to charity.
Remember that Nick Sandmann, the Covington High School student who was falsely accused by outlets of mistreating a Native American, recently settled against CNN and many other networks in his defamation suit. We don’t know how much money he received, but he was asking for $250 million, $50 million less than Dershowitz.
It’s certainly good to Dershowitz holding CNN responsible for its so-called reporting. We’ll have to keep an eye on this case.
The post CNN is facing a 0 million lawsuit for defamation first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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