Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial relationship with reality could catch up with him. A judge on Wednesday dealt Jr. a legal blow, ruling that a libel action filed against him can go ahead and go ahead.
U.S. District Judge John Copenhagenver Jr. went further, berating Trump Jr.’s behavior from the bench.
The lawsuit was first filed two years ago by West Virginia GOP Senate candidate Don Blankenship. Trumpland opposed Blankenship in the state primaries in 2018, so Trump Jr. took to Twitter to call Blankenship a “criminal.”
It was wrong. Blankenship was charged with felonies following an explosion in 2010 at a mine he operated; he was convicted of one count of misdemeanor.
The lawsuit alleges that there is substantial evidence that Trump Jr. knew this at the time he blew it up to his nearly seven million Twitter followers.
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Via the decision:
[P]Plaintiff alleges facts to support inference that Trump, Jr. posted the tweet knowing it was false: (1) Trump, Jr. was involved in high-level discussions about the main campaign in Virginia -Western, (2) he made the statement shortly after such a meeting, (3) the comments were made as part of a series of false comments by sophisticated party agents, (4) the real facts were widely available on the internet and had been widely reported, and (5) he never retracted or corrected the fake tweets, despite being told they were false.
Trump Jr. even repeated the false claim, responding to a Twitter user on May 3, 2018 saying that, “[West Virginia incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin] had probably never run against a criminal.
“I have never been convicted of a crime,” Blankenship wrote to Trump Jr. the next day.
The tweets remained online until June 2018, reports the Washington Post. By then, the Blankenship campaign was long over.
Ultimately, the judge ruled that the complainant’s arguments were “sufficient at this point to create a ‘plausible inference’ that Trump, Jr. posted his tweet knowing it was false.”
But don’t expect the case to give Trump Jr. a new respect for the truth. On the very day the judge ruled, Trump Jr. was busy spreading more blatant lies.
After multiple sources debunked a story that the Taliban hanged a man from an American helicopter left in Afghanistan, Trump Jr. chose a new Twitter profile banner depicting … an edited Biden campaign sign with a man hanging from a helicopter .
