Judge tosses Devin Nunes’ lawsuit against magazine, says family farm used undocumented labor

A federal judge tossed former California Congressman Devin Nunes’ lawsuit against a journalist and magazine that suggested his family’s Iowa dairy farm knowingly employed undocumented workers.

Nunes and his family had sued over a 2018 article that reporter Ryan Lizza wrote for Esquire magazine. For the piece, Lizza visited Sibley, Iowa, and spoke to locals and workers about the Nunes’ dairy, NuStar Farms. Nunes, who does not have a stake in the farm, was representing the area around Tulare in Congress and was a Republican on the House Intelligence Committee at the time.

Judge C.J. Williams in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa decided that, based on what he’d seen throughout the case, what the magazine and reporter published was accurate overall.

“The assertion that NuStar knowingly used undocumented labor is substantially, objectively true,” Williams wrote in his 101-page ruling released Tuesday.

Williams noted that 243 of 319 workers at NuStar Farms on or before the day the article published did not have Social Security numbers that matched Social Security Administration records. He said evidence showed the farm was warned about this, took expired credentials and did not correctly sign forms that verified employees could work legally in the U.S. Six employees who were subpoenaed by Hearst, which owns Esquire, to prove their work authorization pleaded the Fifth Amendment to not self incriminate.

Williams pointed out NuStar Farms never used e-Verify, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s voluntary program for checking a worker’s employment eligibility, even though Nunes praised the program and suggested it should be mandatory in an interview on Fox News in 2019. In a deposition, the judge wrote, Nunes called e-Verify a failed program.

Williams wrote in his decision that Nunes failed to show that he was materially harmed by Lizza’s story.

While he ruled that a reasonable jury would not find for Nunes on most of his arguments, Williams said that there were some factual unknowns which the former congressman and his family could have perhaps used to convince a jury that some of Lizza’s implications were false. But, Williams wrote, they never offered factual evidence denying the allegations.

In separate 2019 lawsuits, Nunes and his family — his father and brother — said that Lizza and Hearst defamed them and aimed to harm their reputation through a story titled “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.”

In the story, Lizza contrasted the farm’s reliance on undocumented labor with Nunes’ ardent backing of former President Donald Trump, whose administration touted anti-immigrant sentiments.

NuStar Farms said the farm did not knowingly rely on undocumented labor.

Nunes had claimed that Lizza and Hearst published the story knowing that it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth — actual malice, the standard he as a public figure needed to prove to recover damages in a libel lawsuit.

The four-year-long lawsuit concluded after Williams initially dismissed Nunes’ case in 2020, appeals court judges reopened it in 2021 over a social media post in which Lizza linked to the story on Twitter, and another judge conjoined the former congressman’s lawsuit with his family’s in 2022.

Nunes can appeal Williams’ ruling.

Nunes and his family had a shared lawyer who represents Nunes in various other lawsuits.

The lawyer, Steven Biss, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did a spokeswoman for Trump’s media company, which Nunes now runs. A lawyer for Hearst forwarded a request for comment to his colleagues at the magazine company who have not yet responded. Lizza, who now works for POLITICO, declined to comment.

In 2022, Nunes left Congress to be the chief executive of the company that controls Truth Social. Still, he continued legal pursuits he started while serving California in the U.S. House.

The Tulare native filed 11 lawsuits against media companies and critics between 2019 and 2022. Most of them have been dismissed or dropped.

Among other suits, Nunes is still trying to sue the anonymous writers behind Twitter accounts that parody a cow and his mother, part of the first case in his string of suits related to defamation claims.

The lawsuit he filed most recently, against CNN and anchor Jake Tapper, was tossed by a federal judge in Florida in March.