“A federal judge in Maryland this week followed through on a previous warning to sanction a lawyer best known for representing Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in a series of failed defamation lawsuits against media companies, saying the lawyer’s latest case against CNN was ‘frivolous’ in nature. U.S. District Judge Richard Bennet, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that attorney Steve Biss had ‘unreasonably and vexatiously’ attempted to continue litigating a lawsuit against the news network after the case had already been dismissed with prejudice for failing to state a claim in March. Despite that ruling, Biss filed an amended complaint that the court went on to describe as ‘nothing more than a repetition of the original complaint with no new material factual allegations.'”

“The original complaint – filed on behalf of Nunes’s senior aide Derek Harvey against CNN, former Rudy Giuliani business associate Lev Parnas, and Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy – stemmed from a November 2020 CNN report that said Parnas was prepared to provide Congress with testimony in connection with Donald Trump’s first impeachment proceeding. CNN reported that Parnas would testify, in effect, that Nunes met with former Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin ‘to discuss digging up dirt of Joe Biden.’ Harvey and Biss initially argued that CNN made 20 defamatory statements, but later filed an amended complaint that narrowed that number down to five. However, Judge Bennet concluded that even the trimmed down complaint contained the same ‘manifest deficiencies’ regarding the statements in question which lacked ‘defamatory meaning’ and failed to ‘plausibly allege material falsity’ and ‘actual malice.’ ‘This Court determined Harvey and his counsel engaged in bad faith conduct in filing the last-minute Amended Complaint in this case, joining a ‘chorus’ of courts sanctioning one of the Plaintiff’s attorneys, Steven Biss,’ the ruling stated. Judge Bennet concluded that CNN’s request for $21,437 in attorney’s fees was reasonable under the circumstances” – Law and Crime.