Main: Michael Flynn appearing on the Huckabee Today in September 2024 (TBN). Inset: Rick Wilson (Lincoln Project/YouTube).
Michael Flynn is seeking a review from the Florida Supreme Court regarding a defamation lawsuit he filed against Rick Wilson, a political strategist and founder of the Lincoln Project. Wilson accused Flynn, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump, of being associated with Putin and being the leader of the QAnon movement.
Flynn took action by filing a notice with the state’s highest court after an appellate court upheld the dismissal of his case last month. Both the trial court and a three-judge panel at the Second District Court of Appeals ruled that Wilson’s statements were protected by the First Amendment. Flynn’s request for a rehearing by the full panel of judges was also denied.
At the initial stage of the filing, Flynn is not required to present his arguments to the Sunshine State’s highest court.
According to Law&Crime, Flynn’s complaint focused on two tweets by Wilson. One tweet referred to Flynn as “Putin employee Mike Flynn,” and the other one was a retweet where Wilson shared a post stating “FYI, Mike Flynn is Q.” The latter tweet alluded to Flynn being a supposed government insider with high-level security clearance who started sharing cryptic messages in 2017 about the deep state’s efforts against the president.
Flynn’s suit sought $50 million in damages as well as a permanent injunction barring Wilson from continuing to defame him.
Describing Flynn as a “quintessential public figure” for the purposes of defamation, the appeals court agreed with Wilson in finding that his statements were protected opinions or rhetorical hyperbole that lacked the “actual malice” required to succeed on a defamation claim.
Regarding the “Putin employee” tweet, the court refused to isolate the word “employee” from the larger context of the tweet, which Wilson posted in direct response to a letter Flynn penned after Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Wilson’s statement may indeed appear to be making a factual claim about Flynn’s economic relationship with Putin. But that is not what a reasonable reader of Wilson’s Twitter feed would think Wilson was trying to communicate,” the court wrote. “Rather, whether Flynn gets a regular paycheck from the Russian Federation — like Putin’s secretary perhaps — just isn’t Wilson’s point. A reasonable reader of Wilson’s response to Flynn’s letter would instead understand Wilson to be expressing essentially the same thing he wrote in his book, namely, what else would you expect from someone ‘in bed with the Russians’?”
The panel further found that Wilson was “simply reacting imaginatively” to Flynn’s letter and that people who saw the tweet would have had access to “widely publicized news stories about Flynn’s purported connections with Russia.”
As for the “Flynn is Q” tweet, the appeals court said “no reasonable jury” could find that the remark defamed Flynn, noting that he “failed in the first instance to demonstrate that the statement was even capable of being proven true or false.”
Describing Flynn’s relationship with the QAnon movement as “complicated,” the decision pointed out that Flynn had publicly denounced QAnon as a “terrorist organization” while simultaneously authorizing the sale of Flynn-themed merchandise “affixed with highly specific slogans commonly associated with QAnon, such as WWG1WGA.”
The panel also emphasized that Flynn, who has the burden of showing Wilson’s comments were false, never provided the court with a sworn statement clarifying that he is not a leader of QAnon.
“Although the record persuades us that most QAnon adherents believe that there is at least one Q (and maybe more), we cannot discern much else about that person or persons, whether inadvertently or by design,” the decision states. “Nevertheless, this ambiguity does not create a genuine issue of material fact for the jury to resolve. If Flynn is not Q (or one of the Qs), then it presumably would not have been hard for him to have filed an affidavit with the trial court to that effect.”
The court went on to call the “Q” tweet an example of generally “nonactionable name calling” without any “verifiable core.”
“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,” the ruling states. “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.”
