Devin Nunes, the former GOP lawmaker who now serves as chief executive for Donald Trump’s media company, has lost his defamation lawsuit against NBCUniversal over comments MSNBC star Rachel Maddow made about his interaction with a pro-Russian operative.
In dismissing the lawsuit, which centered on remarks Maddow made during a March 2021 broadcast, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel concluded that “no reasonable jury could find” that Maddow engaged in “constitutionally-defined actual malice” against Nunes in the segment, which focused on a package he received from Ukrainian businessman Andrii Derkach.
When Nunes was still in Congress and served as the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee in 2019, Derkach – who intelligence agencies described as a Russian agent – addressed a package to Nunes. According to Nunes, the package was promptly handed over the the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In July 2020, however, Politico published a piece with the headline “Democrats: Packets sent to Trump allies are part of foreign plot to damage Biden.” The outlet reported that Nunes “declined repeated requests for comment” but that “one person familiar with the matter said the information was not turned over to the FBI.”
Eight months later, Maddow and her show’s executive producer Cory Gnazzo relied upon that Politico article for a segment that covered an ODNI report and Nunes’ conduct with the Derkach package.
Furthermore, in a separate appearance on MSNBC the day before the Maddow segment, then-Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) remarked about Nunes: “And the fact is that [the Russians] were so comfortable using people like Devin Nunes that Andrii Derkach, a known Russian asset, sent information to Devin Nunes at the Intelligence Committee. We literally had the package receipt.”
Meanwhile, in the Maddow segment, the MSNBC host claimed that Nunes “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 the lawsuit, Nunes said that both Maddow and Gnazzo knew that he had handed the package over to the FBI right away, but they both asserted that they were unaware of other reporting that contradicted their segment. Maddow and Gnazzo were not named defendants in the case, as the complaint was instead directed at NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast. MSNBC will soon be spun off from NBCU into a separate company called Versant.
Nunes, who left Congress in 2022 and is now the CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, contended in his complaint that Maddow and the network harbored “an institutional hostility, hatred, extreme bias, spite and ill-will” towards him.
However, Castel said that there was no clear evidence that the “defendant's admitted political bias caused defendant to act with a reckless disregard of the truth” or that Maddow was aware of “probable falsity” as it related to a separate Politico article that reported the FBI received the package from Nunes.
The Independent has reached out to Nunes and Trump Media. MSNBC declined to comment.
Unlike his boss, Nunes hasn’t been quite so lucky when it comes to his many defamation lawsuits against media organizations and personalities. Between 2019 and 2021, judges tossed out three other complaints that Nunes filed against CNN, the Washington Post, and two parody social media accounts that mocked him online.
Derkach, meanwhile, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in September 2020 for attempting to interfere on Trump’s behalf in that year’s presidential election. He was later indicted for sanctions violations by federal prosecutors in 2022.
