Rep. Devin Nunes, while defending his $150 million lawsuit against The McClatchy Company, Wednesday called the news agency the "biggest perpetrator of fake news" and called on the organization to issue retractions.
"They're the ones that said that [Michael] Cohen was in Prague," the California Republican told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "It was all nonsense and they need to retract those fake stories."
Nunes, in a lawsuit in Virginia, claimed that news organizations' attorneys had conspired with political operative Liz Mair to interfere with his oversight work into Russian election interference and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
McClatchy, in response, called Nunes' lawsuit a "baseless attack" on local journalism and a free press.
“I am absolutely sure that they do not want this to get to discovery so that we find out who their sources are,” Nunes said. “Somebody gave them the phony information that the National Rifle Association was involved with Russia collusion, somebody gave them the phony information that Cohen was in Prague when he wasn’t, somebody gave them phony information about me that they ran over and over again across all of their platforms and digitally accusing me of federal crimes. That’s not OK.”
Nunes last month sued Mair and Twitter. In the McClatchy lawsuit, he claims Mair and reporter MacKenzie Mays conspired to spread smears about him online and in print.
“We sued Twitter because they were shadow banning me, they’re banning conservatives a few weeks ago, we’re taking it to the courts," said Nunes. "Now we’re looking at McClatchy but we are actually going to go after several news media outlets. It is not OK, We are public figures."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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