3/19/19
It’s no easy feat to be the most thin-skinned man in American politics these days, especially given that the country is run by a short-fingered vulgarian who compulsively tweets about every real and perceived slight against him. But Devin Nunes has done the impossible and surpassed even Donald Trump in hypersensitivity. Nunes, a Republican representative from California, filed a $250 million lawsuit on Monday against Twitter and a handful of users who criticized him, accusing them of negligence and defamation. He even claims that the defendants are part of a grand conspiracy to cripple his political career. Who’s leading this dastardly plot? Nunes doesn’t quite say. Maybe it’s the Democratic Party, he suggests. Or unnamed liberal donors. Or even hostile foreign adversaries. Whoever these hostile actors are, they’re not only causing him grievous harm; they’re contributing to “the corruption of American democracy and society.” What the lawsuit really demonstrates, though, is the stunning vindictiveness of a powerful elected official who would use the legal system to punish his critics. If the lawsuit was intended to vindicate Nunes and his reputation, it has achieved precisely the opposite. Nunes rose to national fame over the last two years as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a perch he used to undermine the Russia investigation and defend Trump.
In the complaint, he depicts himself as an honorable public servant who’s been wrongly maligned by his powerful opponents—only one of whom, longtime Republican political operative Liz Mair, is explicitly named. The others are unknown to him: the Twitter users responsible for anonymous parody accounts such as “Devin Nunes’ Mom,” “Devin Nunes’ Cow,” “Fire Devin Nunes,” and “Devin Nunes’ Grapes.” Nunes obliquely implies that Mair is in cahoots with these accounts’ owners, but offers no proof to support the theory. Nunes’s claim for damages also doesn’t hold up. He says that Twitter bears legal responsibility for any defamatory posts made on its platform. In reality, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally shields websites from civil liability related to third-party content on their platforms. Nunes himself should be pretty familiar with this: As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown pointed out, he and his colleagues have been working to change Section 230 for this exact reason. Nunes’s largely anonymous Twitter critics cast him as a shameless partisan hack—someone who abuses power and the legal process to injure his political opponents, who plays fast and loose with the truth to advance partisan goals, and who’s prone to conspiratorial thinking on the flimsiest of grounds. They say he lacks the temperament and honor to serve on the House Intelligence Committee and safeguard the nation’s secrets. His lawsuit only proves them right.
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/world/analysis/2018/01/31/donald-trump-is-in-an-extraordinary-showdown-with-his-own-fbi/nunes.jpg)
