Thanks for the heads up.
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To be fair, although it’s spelled D-E-V-I-N, it’s pronounced “Crack-licking toady to a degenerate fascist”
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Well, a group of people acting in concert to undertake illegal activity is conspiracy.
Hmm, maybe it is necessary to point to dictionary definitions for common words after all…
Take a look at paras. 53-56 of the claim. I’d say if proven (which is of course a big if) everyone would agree that that is conduct which should be illegal.
As for defamation, everything else would hinge on whether a court agrees this is actionable defamation.
I’d say he has a shot there. I know the US allows a wide latitude, especially when it comes to talking about people in the public eye, but the claim alleges flat out malicious lying. Those are not protected expressions even against public figures if I understand US defamation law correctly.
I certainly agree the point is not to win the lawsuit. It’s to be able to say he started it and get the base fired up about the liberal, fake news media, etc.
And also of course perhaps bankrupt the people who said nasty things about him on Twitter which he can probably manage quite handily without having to win the case.
And yes, campaign finance violations would also appear to be involved if his claims are true. But he can’t bring proceedings about those.
This way is a win-win situation for him.
If he wins, he gets to point to a court ruling of a massive conspiracy to defame him and therefore by extension to do the same to other “conservatives”.
If he loses, it’s a sign that the liberal conspiracy has captured the court system and “conservatives” must take action to vote in more “conservatives”.
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Really? It literally sounds like a description of every political campaign that has ever slung mud. Would you say that a political opponent is involved in a conspiracy if they, in conjunction with their staff, spread falsehoods about the other candidate? Except in this case, it makes accusations of coordination without any proof or even reasoning. It makes Nunes seem incredulous that more than one person might not like him so they must be conspiring together. This seems just as thin as the attempt to get around 230.
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It is long overdue to have Trump and Nunes’s twitter accounts shutdown. They are slandering, racists, advocating violences, liars, propagandists, etc… Shut them down.
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Paying people to spread actual straight-up, deliberate, known falsehoods for the purpose of damaging the opponent’s reputation?
Hell, yes. Slinging mud is one thing. There is a line even politicians aren’t supposed to cross and that line is active malicious lies.
So claiming Obama isn’t American is one thing if you can claim you genuinely believe it.
If you’re on record as saying you know darn well it’s not true but you’re going to say it anyway because it’ll damage his election chances and then you do - that’s actionable.
If you get someone else to say it who also doesn’t believe it, that’s conspiracy.
Granted. As I say, I doubt he can prove it (certainly not all of it).
The bit that I think takes this out of the ordinary is that he asserts at at least one of the people he is suing actively offers to tell lies about people for money and was paid to do so about him.(paras. 7-8)
He then assumes that anyone saying nasty things about him must also be connected to each other and that’s certainly on shaky ground.
I do like that while they have to explain who Scabbers is, they avoid spoilers (para. 9 - which by the way has to be in the running for “Longest ‘paragraph’ ever” I mean I know they say each pleading should be set out in its own paragraph but there is a limit) - and footnote 16). That’s nice.
On the downside, I never thought I’d see the urban dictionary definition of ‘taint’ quoted in legal pleadings… (footnote 15). 
Oh, the lawsuit also claims that it was falsely asserted that Mr Nunes would be willing to give Trump a blowjob.
So he’s asserting that he would not be prepared to fellate the President. How does that make Donny feel? Sadface?
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There is a line even politicians aren’t supposed to cross and that line is active malicious lies.
I haven’t seen that line uncrossed in national elections for most of my middle-aged life, and that’s only because I was too young to remember Reagan v Mondale in '84.
If you’re on record as saying you know darn well it’s not true but you’re going to say it anyway because it’ll damage his election chances and then you do - that’s actionable.
Eh, so only pathological liars will be immune to this standard because they’ll never admit on record that they don’t believe it. That’s not promising.
If you get someone else to say it who also doesn’t believe it, that’s conspiracy.
So you want to outlaw PR firms? I’m fine with that, but I don’t see that getting anywhere.
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If it isn’t defamation, where is the alleged crime in those paragraphs? I’m not being snarky, by the way, I just don’t see how they’ve plead anything that survives if this isn’t defamatory speech. Private groups are allowed to pay other people to say bad things about political figures, after all.
For the most part, they are, especially in the context of satire or political speech. It’s the reason that HRC didn’t (and couldn’t) sue Trump or the Benghazi truthers for defamation when they accused her of all manner of crimes, and Kerry didn’t (and couldn’t) sue the people who put out the swiftboat stuff.
That’s not really an accurate statement about how the law works on this, I don’t believe. What is your source for that understanding?
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If it happens to you, it’s frivolous. If it happens to me, it’s tragedy.
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That is absolutely true in my case; like Two Girls, One Cup, any version of The Human Centipede is something that I need never see for myself.
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How does Nunes have standing to file this suit in Virginia? Is he claiming residency there (in which case, he needs to resign his House seat yesterday-ish), or is he claiming the individuals who created the parody accounts live there?
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Yes, thank you! I’m mad that I even know about it. I’ll forget about it for days, weeks, months, then someone will remind me it exists. 
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My 14 y/o kid’s friends wanted her to watch it with them; I didn’t even have to tell her ‘no,’ she declined on her own, immediately after hearing the premise.
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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.
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Maybe the Twitter servers reside, among other places, in Virginia? I’ve worked in a bunch of data centers out by Dulles. Literally acres and acres and acres of computer racks.
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IKR
Maybe somewhere in there is Nunes’s Mom
or Cow. 
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Ok, setting aside the issue of defamation (which we agree is the lynchpin to it all), the Sullivan standard is such a high bar at this point that it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where a court would actually enforce it in favor of a national figure politician in a case of obvious satire and parody. If the Sullivan standard had any real application to political speech at this point, the Clintons would have been able to bankrupt Richard Mellon Scaife several times over
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Shit rolls downhill. “Shit flows down hole.”
