Last Friday, Judge Raag Singhal of the state of Florida (USA) dismissed the defamation lawsuit filed by former President Donald Trump against the CNN television network, in which he claimed $475 million in punitive damages, local press reports. .
In the document, presented before a federal court in Fort Lauderdale last October, the former president argued that the use of the term “the big lie” with which the channel referred to its attempts to annul the 2020 presidential elections was equivalent to compare it to Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
However, the judge, appointed during the Trump Administration, ruled that CNN’s comments were not defamatory because they constituted an opinion.
«The use of the phrase […] does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people,” Singhal said, adding that while the court finds that “Nazi references in political speech […] “They are hateful and disgusting,” “bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.”
The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, which prevents it from being filed again in another court.
In a statement, Trump presidential campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said they “agree with the highly respected judge’s conclusions” that CNN’s statements about the former president “are repugnant,” and indicated that the television network “will be responsible for his unfair mistreatment” of the politician and his supporters. With RT
