Trump's lawyers Richard Klugh and Alejandro Brito on March 29 filed an appeal — months after his lawsuit was dismissed last summer by U.S. District Judge Anuraag Singhal — to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Law&Crime reported Tuesday.
The lawyers claim Singhal's ruling was “erroneous" and point to CNNS hosts or commentators who made 60 comments in 2020 that Trump considered objectionable as proof.
They argue CNN unfairly linked Trump to “ongoing false claims of knowing lies and misleading Nazi linkage throughout the defendant’s programming.”
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Judge Singhal ruled the comments did not equal falsehood but opinion.
"Acknowledging that CNN acted with political enmity does not save this case; the Complaint alleges no false statements of fact," Singhal wrote last year. "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."
He went on to conclude that the comments were opinions.
Oddly, Law&Crime remarks, Trump went on to adopt the phrase "the Big Lie" himself to describe his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
The Trump filing alleges the network “derided his honesty and trustworthiness” by claiming that he “knowingly and intentionally lied in every comment about 2020 election integrity issues” and “aligned him with arguably the most evil, murderous political figure and regime in history” by attempting to take away the votes of Americans.
“The district court’s structural lapse in failing to consider the entirety of the defamatory statements alleged in the complaint, reflecting the staggering breadth and scope of CNN’s ongoing, malicious, and defamatory linkage — both in broadcast statements and imagery — of plaintiff with Hitler and Nazism amounted to clear error and manifest injustice warranting reconsideration,” the filing continued.
The report notes Trump is dealing with hefty civil court judgments in New York.
Trump has been ordered to pay writer E. Jean Carroll a total of about approximately $91 million in her two civil lawsuits and received a $464 million ruling in his civil fraud case, roughly the same amount as his CNN lawsuit demands.
