By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
MAGA frontman Mike Flynn’s Florida libel suit against MAGA saboteur Rick Wilson flamed out this month, leaving Flynn to expect a six-figure bill for Wilson’s attorney fees.
But free speech fans shouldn’t be dancing in the streets. Flynn’s case is just one of many defamation claims that lawyer Jesse Binnall is pursuing with the obvious goal of reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.
A fierce champion of President Donald Trump, Binnall seems intent on convincing the high court’s conservative majority to scrap Times v. Sullivan. The 61-year-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling means as much to the media as Roe v. Wade means to supporters of reproductive healthcare.
In Sullivan the court relied on the First Amendment to set a high bar for public officials who want to hold the media liable for errors in protected speech: They must prove the publisher acted with “actual malice,” knowing or strongly suspecting their information was false but using it anyway. Later the rule was extended to public figures such as Flynn.
Sullivan should be “retired as it no longer fits society today and lacks any constitutional foundation,” an article published by Binnall’s law firm declares.
Reversing Sullivan would “open up” libel law, which Trump has called for, along with inflicting revenge on carriers of “fake news.” Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, members of the conservative court majority, have suggested they’d welcome a chance to revisit Sullivan’s media-friendly ruling.
And because the Supreme Court finds a way to take up any matter it wants to review, Flynn v. Wilson or some other Binnall case may turn out to be the right vehicle to transport the Sullivan issue to Washington, D.C.
‘THIS WAS JUST LAWFARE’
“We knew from the beginning that this was just lawfare,” Wilson said about Flynn’s lawsuit during a podcast for The Lincoln Project, the Trump-bashing political action committee he co-founded in 2019. Wilson posted the podcast on YouTube in December, when his “phenomenal” lawyers defeated Flynn’s team in the Second District Court of Appeal (DCA).
Flynn is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who served for less than a month in 2017 as Trump’s first national security advisor. He resigned after reportedly lying about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States.
Flynn pleaded guilty to a felony count of making false statements to the FBI about the Kislyak talks but later tried to withdraw his plea; in the end Trump pardoned him. Since leaving government, Flynn has promoted the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy movement and militant Christian nationalism.
In 2023 Flynn sued Wilson for $50 million for retweeting a post calling Flynn a “Putin employee.” And for Wilson’s retweet of this: “Flynn is Q,”an anonymous QAnon figure. Flynn filed his lawsuit against Tallahassee resident Wilson in Sarasota, where Flynn lives.
Last week the Florida Supreme Court declined to review the 2nd DCA ruling that ended Flynn’s libel case. Wilson is authorized to recoup his attorney fees from Flynn; in the podcast he said he’d paid out “six figures of zeroes, a lot of money” over 18 months and “it was worth it.“ Wilson’s lawyer was Leonard Collins of GrayRobinson in Tallahassee.
Wilson, a former GOP strategist and author of “Everything Trump Touches Dies” (2018) and “Running Against the Devil” (2020), said he won’t let himself be “terrorized” into submission and silence.
“It’s gonna be a long fight. I’m staying in that fight,” Wilson said.
ONE FALSITY, TWO LAWSUITS
The lawyer who represented Flynn is Jared Roberts, an associate at Binnall’s Alexandria, VA law firm. A 2021 law school graduate, Roberts has a flourishing defamation practice — “Jared’s passion is defending the rights and reputations of others,” his law firm bio says.
Currently Roberts is defending the reputation of U.S. Navy veteran Zachary Young with a libel complaint he filed March 28 against Puck News in Bay City, northwest Florida.
The lawsuit piggybacks on successful litigation against CNN by targeting Puck for repeating CNN’s “false claims” about Young in a separate report. Roberts filed the complaint in the same court and drew the same judge who handled the CNN case.
CNN had wrongly implied that Young’s security firm took money from people who were desperate to flee Afghanistan during the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021, according to Fox News Digital. In fact, the website says, the firm contracted with corporate sponsors, not individuals, to fund the rescue operation.
A Bay City jury awarded Young $4 million for lost earnings and $1 million for pain and suffering in January. The parties settled confidentially before jurors could award Young high punitive damages against CNN. His lawyer was Devin Freedman, a partner in a Miami law firm.
With the Puck case, Binnall’s firm added Young to its roster of clients who take on the media. Wilson said in his podcast that Flynn has sued CNN, NBC and, from MSNBC, anchor Nicolle Wallace and legal analyst Andrew Weissmann – and Wilson allowed there may be more he doesn’t know about.
Binnall’s firm “has made a ton of money from Trump World,” Wilson said.
Not all of it’s from libel cases.
BINNALL’S RICO APPEAL
Roberts and his boss Binnall represent Trump in a case alleging defamation on steroids: Trump v. Clinton, now on appeal to the federal 11th Circuit in Atlanta.
In 2022, the year after Roberts graduated from Case Western Reserve University School of Law, he was on the legal team behind a sprawling civil RICO lawsuit. It claims that Hillary Clinton, a host of notable Democrats, Christopher Steele of salacious “dossier” fame and other Trump enemies conspired to steal the 2016 presidential election away from him.
Even though they failed, proving a RICO conspiracy means triple damages for the plaintiff. In this case, that would be Trump.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of West Palm Beach wasn’t having any of it.
“This case should never have been brought,” he wrote in his Trump v. Clinton dismissal order.
“These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims,” Middlebrooks wrote. “This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”
Middlebrooks ordered nearly $1 million in frivolous-litigation sanctions against Trump and his lawyers Alina Habba – Trump’s pick for U.S. Attorney in New Jersey – and Peter Ticktin of Deerfield Beach.
Now the main case and the sanctions are on appeal to the conservative 11th Circuit, where Binnall and Roberts represent Trump, Habba and her law firm.
In late 2021, Binnall represented Trump in an attempt to shield presidential records from the House committee probing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Binnall accused committee members of trying to harass Trump with a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition,” The New York Times reported.
Binnall lost that battle in the D.C. federal appellate court, and the National Archives released the records to the committee. At the same time, though, Binnall helped refine the argument for broad presidential immunity from prosecution that the U.S. Supreme Court adopted in July 2024.
BINNALL SPEAKS FOR FLYNN
Binnall also advocated for Trump in the court of public opinion. During the New York election interference trial that ended with Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, on March 26, 2024 Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order to stifle Trump’s broadsides against the judge’s law clerk and prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
In response Binnall, who was not involved in the case, went ballistic on Fox News. “This is truly dystopian,” he said. Binnall called the gag order “one of the biggest affronts to the First Amendment that we’ve ever seen in the history of our republic.”
Last year, when The New York Times published a story headlined “Michael Flynn Has Turned His Trump-World Celebrity Into a Family Business,” Binnall served as the Flynn family spokesman. The story says the nonprofit Flynn heads, America’s Future Inc., was “trafficking in conspiracy theories” and paying 29 percent of its budget to the Flynns although it was “running in the red.”
Binnall told The Times the Flynns earned their pay and denied any wrongdoing. He added in a statement, “General Flynn’s dedication to the cause of American freedom is steadfast and resolute.” His family’s “strength, unity and dedication to America should be celebrated, not attacked.”
Apparently that negative account hasn’t resulted in a libel suit. Flynn would run up against the same Times v. Sullivan problem he had in the Wilson case: It would be very hard to prove the newspaper committed libel by publishing a fact-based story about a public figure’s nonprofit.
“Flynn is a quintessential public figure,” says the 2nd DCA decision that ended his libel case against Wilson. It was written by Judge Susan Rothstein-Youakim, with Judges Darryl Casanueva and Morris Silberman concurring.
“We have the privilege of living in a country with a ‘profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks,’ ” the opinion says, quoting the Sullivan decision.
“As the trial court noted, Wilson’s tweets may not have been polite, and they may not have been fair. But the First Amendment required neither, and so we affirm.”
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