By Jim Saunders ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — A state appeals court Wednesday upheld a decision dismissing a defamation lawsuit that former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn filed against Rick Wilson, a political strategist and key player in the “Never Trump” movement.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the lawsuit, which Flynn filed because of two social media posts. Wilson referred to Flynn in a 2022 tweet as “Putin employee Mike Flynn” and in 2023 retweeted “FYI, Mike Flynn is Q.”
Flynn filed the lawsuit last year in Sarasota County, but Circuit Judge Hunter Carroll ruled for Wilson on Jan. 30.
The appeals court panel Wednesday described Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general and Sarasota County resident, as a “quintessential public figure” and said he needed to show that Wilson published the posts with actual malice. In an 18-page opinion, the court said Flynn did not meet that legal standard and that the tweets were “nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole or opinion.”
“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 said, partially quoting a U.S. Supreme Court precedent. “Like it or not, such attacks are a characteristic feature of our democracy — regardless of the political persuasion of the speaker and regardless of the political persuasion of the public figure on the receiving end of that speech. 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 (Carroll’s decision).”
Flynn and Wilson have been high-profile figures in the political wars that have surrounded former President — and now President-elect — Donald Trump in recent years. Wilson, a longtime Florida Republican strategist, has been a major critic of Trump, including helping found The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump organization.
Wednesday’s opinion said Wilson published the “Putin employee” tweet as a response to a letter that Flynn published in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. Flynn’s letter criticized President Joe Biden, saying in part that the White House “ignored and laughed at Putin’s legitimate security concerns and legitimate ethnic problems” in Ukraine, according to the appeals court.
The opinion, written by Judge Susan Rothstein-Youakim and joined by Judges Darryl Casanueva and Morris Silberman, also cited previous controversies related to Flynn and Russia.
“Wilson’s tweet appears together with the text of Flynn’s letter,” the opinion said. “A reasonable reader would understand that Wilson was simply reacting imaginatively to Flynn’s fully disclosed letter. That reasonable reader encountering Wilson’s tweet would also have had at their mental disposal the prior widely publicized news stories about Flynn’s purported connections with Russia — stories that indeed would have been familiar to essentially anyone who followed the news during the first years of the Trump presidency. … A reasonable reader of Wilson’s tweet simply would not think that Wilson was responding to Flynn’s letter about the invasion of Ukraine by purporting to make a literally true, factual claim about Flynn’s employment status.”
The appeals court also said it agreed with the circuit judge that “no reasonable jury could find that Wilson defamed Flynn through the retweet of ‘FYI, Mike Flynn is Q’” — a reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
“Indeed, on this record, ‘Flynn is Q’ becomes just another example of generally nonactionable name calling that lacks a verifiable factual core,” the opinion said.
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