FBI Nominee Patel’s CNN Defamation Lawsuit Fails to Advance (1)

President Donald Trump’s FBI director pick, Kash Patel, failed to advance his defamation case against CNN because he couldn’t overcome the “exacting constitutional standards” that protect statements he challenged from two stories that ran on the broadcast network’s website in late 2020, a Virginia appeals court said.

A divided Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of Patel’s defamation suit on Tuesday. Writing for the majority, Judge Rosemarie Annunziata concluded that while Patel’s complaint contains many factual allegations that “we accept as true,” those detailed allegations target CNN generally, “and do not even attempt to ‘bring home’ the requisite ‘state of mind’ to the actual publishers of the challenged statements in this case.”

Patel sued CNN for “defamation and defamation by implication” based on a Nov. 24, 2020 CNN article that said that “Patel [is] a Trump loyalist who was connected to efforts to spread conspiracy theories about Joe Biden,” and another story that ran on Dec. 5 of that year, which made a similar claim.

Defamation requires a false statement, Annunziata said. When the plaintiff is a public official like Patel, constitutional free speech principles require the specific publishers of the false statement to subjectively know that the statement was false or harbor a belief that “it was probably false and publish it anyway,” she said.

“Yet the numerous allegations in Patel’s complaint target CNN generally,” Annunziata said. Patel “relies on nonbinding, conclusory assertions that CNN as a media company acted with actual malice, which [is] unsupported by specific, material facts necessary to find the existence of a basis for judgment.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hold Patel’s confirmation hearing as soon as Jan. 29.

Patel has filed at least six lawsuits since 2019, including the CNN case and three other defamation suits, most of which were dismissed or withdrawn by Patel, according to a recent Bloomberg News account.

Judge Steven C. Frucci dissented, saying that even accepting Patel’s factual allegations as true, the trial court erred by incorrectly deciding the dispute on the pleadings without allowing the parties to conduct a trial on the merits.

Judge Vernida Rochelle Chaney joined Annunziata’s opinion.

Binnall Law Group represents Patel. Davis Wright Tremaine LLP represents CNN.

The case is Patel v. Cable News Network Inc., 2025 BL 17332, Va. Ct. App., No. 1573-23-4, 1/21/25