Citing Donald Trump's First Amendment rights, a California federal judge completely tossed Stormy Daniels's defamation lawsuit against Trump on Monday, in a move the Trump regime is calling "total victory" for Tang the Conqueror, but the story is far from over.
U.S. District Judge S. James Otero in Los Angeles ruled that Trump’s speech was protected by the First Amendment as the kind of “rhetorical hyperbole” normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States.” He ordered Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, to pay Trump’s legal fees.
Trump attorney Charles Harder cheered Otero’s decision.
“No amount of spin or commentary by Stormy Daniels or her lawyer, Mr. Avenatti, can truthfully characterize today’s ruling in any way other than total victory for President Trump and total defeat for Stormy Daniels,” Harder said in an emailed statement.
The ruling is a blow for Daniels and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who has raised a national profile from his legal battles against the president and is contemplating a presidential bid in 2020.
Avenatti called the ruling “limited” on Twitter and said it did not affect Daniels’s primary case against Trump and his former attorney Michael Cohen, which seeks to invalidate her 2016 nondisclosure agreement.
“Daniels’ other claims against Trump and Cohen proceed unaffected,” Avenatti wrote in a tweet he later appeared to have deleted.
He said in a second tweet that any fees Trump might be awarded from the defamation case would “be dwarfed by the fees he and Cohen will be required to pay in connection with the NDA case.”
Later, Avenatti tweeted that he had appealed Otero’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
The now-dismissed suit has received less attention than two other cases pending against Trump — Daniels’s lawsuit seeking to void the nondisclosure agreement and a separate defamation claim by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her in 2007 and argues that he defamed her when he suggested she was lying.
Trump was ordered last month to provide written answers under oath in that case, which is proceeding in New York State Supreme Court.
Again, the Daniels defamation lawsuit was the least of Trump's legal worries, and the least likely to succeed given how difficult it is to prove defamation in court, least of all against a sitting federal politician, least of all the occupant of the Oval Office.
The othr Daniels lawsuit involving former Trump lawyer Michal Cohen and the legality of the NDA Trump slapped on Daniels over her alleged affair with Trump, well, that one is far more likely to succeed, and for the same reason: First Amendment rights.
We'll see how this particular storm blows.
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