Authored by Venus Upadhayaya via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Former President Donald Trump, who sued CNN for defamation early this week, said in an interview on Wednesday that the media should prove his allegations about the 2020 presidential election being rigged are false.
CNN had termed Trump’s allegations a “big lie,” a term that Trump claimed was coined by anchors to malign his reputation. While talking to hosts John Solomon and Amanda Head on the Real America’s Voice network show “Just The News No Noise” on Oct. 5, Trump said CNN should “prove the big lie.”
“They’ll say whatever comes to mind. They talk about the big lie. I said, well prove the big lie. The big lie is not a big lie at all. The big lie is the opposite,” said Trump.
“All the stats–we have everything. Unfortunately, we haven’t had judges that want to look at it. They don’t want to change elections.”
The former President filed a lawsuit against CNN on Monday, alleging defamation and seeking $475 million in punitive damages.
“And so we sued CNN for a lot of money and we’ll see how that goes. I think it should go very well,” Trump said.
The 29-page lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, accuses CNN of having “sought to use its massive influence–purportedly as a ‘trusted’ news source” to defame Trump “for the purpose of defeating him politically.”
The effort resulted in CNN claiming credit for “[getting] Trump out” in the 2020 presidential election, attorneys for Trump said in the complaint (pdf) adding that the “libel and slander” against Trump has only escalated in recent months because CNN fears Trump’s presidential campaign for 2024.
“CNN has been given the dreaded ‘Pants on Fire!’ designation by PolitiFact for its stories comparing Trump to Hitler,” said the attorneys.
They were referring to two psychiatrists discussing coverage of Trump on CNN’s now-canceled “Reliable Sources” program. Allen James Frances, the chairman emeritus of Duke University’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, had said on the show: “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were. He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.”
Politifact, a fact-checking website operated by the Poynter Institute of MediaStudies had done a fact-check on the claim and rated it as “Pants on Fire” on its “Truth-O-Meter,” which means “the statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”
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