No, I agree. If it doesn’t reach the bar of defamation, the rest all falls by the wayside.
I’m happy to be corrected.
Sources for my view would include:
http://kellywarnerlaw.com/us-defamation-laws/
https://www.law.upenn.edu/journals/jil/jilp/articles/1-1_Yeh_Ching-Yuan.pdf
Basically, New York Times v. Sullivan
Well, the difficulty is the requirement that people be able to prove that you did it and if you did, that you knew it wasn’t true and acted with malice.
Those are all huge hurdles to get over. And of course most politicians realise that if they do more than complain about dirty tricks, their opponents will start to do more than complain about their dirty tricks. Everyone’s dirty so no one complains.
This is a change from the norm because one presumably dirty party is brazen enough to accuse the other of dirty tricks in court.
I never said it was promising 
I should have said - get someone else to say it who also knows it is a lie. The trick is not to know it’s a lie.
Also just because something is legally actionable doesn’t stop it happening or make it “illegal”. Lots of businesses exist to do stuff that is technically illegal and do it all the time. Sometimes they even get sued over it.
He says Twitter is registered to do business there and one of the defendants lives there.
