President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to revive his defamation lawsuit against CNN over the network’s use of the phrase “big lie” regarding his claims about the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump said in his petition that the consequences of his case are “especially grave” because, he said, the network “launched a false campaign against the President of the United States, first while in office and then as a leading candidate to return to that office.”
In March, the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined to consider his case, after a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a district judge’s ruling against him. Two of the three judges from the unanimous panel ruling were Trump appointees, as was the district judge who dismissed his suit in 2023. The judge did so on the grounds that the statements at issue were opinion, not factually false statements, and that Trump hadn’t shown that CNN acted with “actual malice.”
Trump argued that the use of the “big lie” phrase was intended to associate him with Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda. But the appellate panel deemed his claim “unpersuasive,” calling his assumption that the term is clear enough to be a factual statement “untenable.” It called his other claims “meritless.”
At the high court, the legal question he wants the justices to consider is whether the First Amendment protects a publisher from defamation liability when, as he put it, the publisher “conveys provably false factual accusations through a pejorative label and accompanying inflammatory imagery.”
It takes four justices to grant review of a petition. CNN’s response to the petition is due Sept. 21. The justices aren’t on a deadline to decide whether to take the appeal or not.
The petition is the president’s latest request for the justices to intervene in his personal litigation, following another petition that seeks to avenge his latest loss in his civil litigation against E. Jean Carroll.
In June, the high court declined to review a petition from Alan Dershowitz in his own defamation case against CNN. Dershowitz said he was defamed by coverage of his statements about the scope of impeachable offenses when he represented Trump during his first impeachment trial in his first term.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the denial, echoing their prior calls for the court to revisit a landmark precedent in this area of the law and the actual-malice standard that public figures must meet to bring successful defamation claims.
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