Devin Nunes Sues CNN: Reveals He Was Not in Vienna in Late 2018, Did Not Meet Victor Shokin

Breitbart: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against CNN for a fake news story the outlet printed about him before Thanksgiving, revealing in the lawsuit that he was never as CNN alleged in Vienna in late 2018 and did not meet with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor CNN alleged he met with there.

Nunes’s lawsuit includes revelations of key facts that undermine the case CNN made against him, severely harming the news outlet’s credibility. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Virginia, shows Nunes is seeking more than $435 million in damages from CNN over the fake news it printed against him. But more importantly, it demonstrates that Nunes was 100 percent correct when he told Breitbart News before Thanksgiving that CNN’s story was untrue–and that CNN was completely inaccurate in its reporting and had relied on a compromised source for its piece.

It remains to be seen how successful this lawsuit will be–it is very difficult for public figures to successfully sue media outlets because of a variety of protections the media are afforded–but the facts as laid out by Nunes and his attorney in this suit are particularly damning for CNN as Nunes and his team successfully demonstrate that the network engaged in printing and then disseminating demonstrably false information about him.

Back before Thanksgiving, CNN reported what would have been a big story if it were true.

“Exclusive: Giuliani associate willing to tell Congress Nunes met with ex-Ukrainian official to get dirt on Biden” was the headline on reporter Vicky Ward’s piece.

The piece opened with these explosive allegations:

A lawyer for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani told CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden.

The attorney, Joseph A. Bondy, represents Lev Parnas, the recently indicted Soviet-born American who worked with Giuliani to push claims of Democratic corruption in Ukraine. Bondy said that Parnas was told directly by the former Ukrainian official that he met last year in Vienna with Rep. Devin Nunes.

“Mr. Parnas learned from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin that Nunes had met with Shokin in Vienna last December,” said Bondy.

The CNN piece followed a previous story from the Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan, which alleged that Nunes was in regular contact with Lev Parnas–the associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has since been indicted on charges unrelated to the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Trump.

As Breitbart News reported exclusively at the time, these stories were untrue. Nunes did not get into specifics on the facts with his original quote on them with Breitbart News, just stating that they were false and that he intended to sue both CNN and the Daily Beast. There’s a lot more here