Posted on 09/24/2018 10:43:45 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A federal judge on Monday said that a tweet by President Trump at the center of Stormy Daniels's defamation lawsuit against Trump was "rhetorical hyperbole" rather than defamation.
“This appears to be rhetorical hyperbole by a public official involving a public figure,” U.S. District Judge S. James Otero said at a hearing Monday, according to Bloomberg News.
Otero didn't issue a ruling Monday, but Bloomberg and the Associated Press reported that his comments could signal he is leaning toward throwing out the lawsuit because Trump's tweet was protected speech.
Daniels, the adult-film star, filed the suit in April over a tweet Trump sent that month regarding a sketch that Daniels released of a man that she says approached her and her infant daughter in a parking lot and threatened her.
Trump wrote on Twitter that the situation was “a total con job” and shared a tweet that compared the sketch to a photo of Daniels’s ex-husband, suggesting that the two are the same person.
(TWEET-AT-LINK)
Daniels's lawsuit alleges that Trump's tweet amounted to defamation because it accused her of fabricating the incident and that in posting the tweet, Trump knew that Daniels "would be subjected to threats of violence, economic harm, and reputational damage."
Trump’s lawyer, Charles Harder, argued Monday that Trump's tweet was his way of "calling B.S." on Daniels's claim, not a statement of fact, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg also reported that Otero said Monday that he would hold a hearing in December over a separate lawsuit that Daniels has brought against Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen over a $130,000 hush-money payment made to Daniels before the 2016 election. Daniels has challenged the validity of that payment.
Cohen pleaded guilty last month to a count of making an excessive campaign contribution on Oct. 27, 2016, the same date Cohen finalized the payment to Daniels. Cohen implicated Trump in the charge, saying that he made the payment at the direction of the then-candidate.
I hope she has to pay the penalty for breaking the agreement. I think a 2 or 3 million dollar penalty will assure both stormy and the creepy porn lawyer drop from sight.
Creepy porn lawyer had better hope he doesn’t get AIDS or syph when he’s “taking it out in trade” from Miss Dum Cumpster...
If that Tweet qualifies as Defamation, what the Democrats are doing to Judge Kavanaugh should be treated as a Capital Offense with the appropriate Punishment.
The baby Harp seal cure...
Some are faulting me for posting vile stuff about the vile Democrats - but they haven't read the Twitter slime about Kavanaugh...
How can one possibly sully the reputation of a porn star (without reference to what she can’t perform, that is)?
George Soros is one of the richest men on Earth and a million dollars is like a Benjamin to him.
I hope that President Trump, in a public forum, that Stormy Daniels is just a washed-up, bitter whore. Even that is something she cannot sue him for defamation because it is obviously, publically true.
She is a whore. Donald Trump is my President.
Yes and it seems they are mad he keeps the whore out of the Whitehouse instead of in as Bill Clinton would do
Isn’t Stormy herself a hyperbole? Or at least a certain part of her is?
somewhere tonite, Avenetti is sweating
somewhere tonite, Avenetti is sweating
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Nah CPL has moved on to the next ambulance.
no ambulances left for him. This latest boast, has him treading unarmed into the power structure of the liberal privileged elites crowd, who’s children now grown and well-employed, and institutions well-supported by family endowments, he is accusing of raw hedonism and sex trafficking. Elites don’t like troublemakers. The smackdown is coming. It will be awesome and definitive.
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