Appeals Court Refuses Trump's Request To Reconsider CNN Defamation Suit

President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN appears to be dead for the time being, as an appeals court denied his motion to rehear the case.

A three-judge panel had held in November that Trump hadn’t done enough to show that CNN compared him to Adolph Hitler when it described his claims about the 2020 election as “the Big Lie.” In a brief unsigned order on March 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit said that none of its judges asked for a vote to reconsider the case.

Trump told the circuit that the three-judge panel erred.

He wanted the full panel to consider whether his case should be decided by a jury instead of the court, and to reconsider whether the statements made by the network’s journalists allowed him to sue.

The order also ruled out the possibility of a rehearing by the original three-judge panel.

As Stacy Robinson reports for The Epoch Times, Trump sued CNN in 2022 after the network’s journalists repeatedly referred to his disputation of the 2020 election results as a “Big Lie.”

That terminology has historically been used in reference to Hitler’s Nazi regime, his propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and the push for a genocide of the Jewish people.

“CNN has acknowledged that the term the ‘Big Lie’ is a direct reference to Adolf Hitler and Nazism and uses the term in relation to the Plaintiff to create a false and incendiary association between the Plaintiff and Hitler,” Trump’s complaint alleged.

A district court found that CNN’s language was just “hyperbole,” and not meant literally. They dismissed the case.

In a unanimous decision, the 11th Circuit affirmed that dismissal. “To be clear, CNN has never explicitly claimed that Trump’s ‘actions and statements were designed to be, and actually were, variations of those [that] Hitler used to suppress and destroy populations,’” its decision read.

Trump wanted the full panel to determine if his case warranted a jury trial, and reconsider whether the CNN journalists’ language allowed him to sue.

CNN asked the court to toss out the case, saying the term “Big Lie” is “rhetorical hyperbole and does not refer to Hitler or Nazism.” Trump could not prove the network acted with “actual malice,” by publishing statements it knew were false, CNN argued.

“Actual malice is an extremely high evidentiary burden for any plaintiff to meet, much less the former President of the United States of America, and he has utterly failed to meet that burden here,” CNN’s response brief reads.

In July 2023, Florida District Judge Raag Singhal dismissed Trump’s suit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again.

He ruled that there was “no question” that such statements met the standard for defamation under the law. But, he said, they were statements of opinion, and not fact—even though he found them to be “odious and repugnant.”

“CNN’s use of the phrase ’the Big Lie' in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people,” Singhal wrote.

“No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.”

Trump appealed that ruling, arguing the judge had failed “to consider the totality and context of the defamatory statements,” by “finding that CNN’s statements were pure opinion or rhetorical hyperbole.”

The CNN case is one of several defamation suits Trump has brought against news outlets. Last year, the president sued the Wall Street Journal for publishing a birthday card he allegedly sent to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. That case is ongoing.

In 2024, Trump obtained a $15 million settlement against ABC and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who claimed on air that Trump was “found liable for rape.”

Last September, a judge threw out a $15 billion suit against the New York Times and some of its reporters on the grounds that Trump’s legal brief broke court rules: It was unnecessarily lengthy and contained improper language, the judge ruled.

Trump refiled that suit in October.

The president has also teed up a suit against the BBC, after reports it had altered a video of him speaking to supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to make it appear as if he was promoting violence. The BBC on March 16 asked the court to dismiss the suit.