Thursday, April 12, 2018

UPDATE: DISMISSED.....100 Days Too Late, $100M Short: Saying Michael Cohen's "Too Late" & That There's No Malice, Fusion GPS Moves To Dismiss Cohen's Steele Dossier Defamation Suit (READ, OFF-TOPIC)

UPDATE, 4/19, 10:30am: Facing a deadline next week to respond to Fusion GPS' Motion to Dismiss, Cohen yesterday voluntarily dismissed his $100M defamation suit. (below) He also dismissed the separate action against Buzzfeed. Following the FBI raid of Cohen's offices, there were reports that they had evidence that Cohen had traveled to the Czech Republic during the campaign; Cohen's defamation suits were based on his claims that that part of the dossier was false.


Fusion GPS moved to dismiss  Michael Cohen's $100M defamation suit yesterday, claiming the embattled Trump attorney filed the action well after the one-year statute of limitations, and that Cohen does not have any facts to indicate that the research firm had "actual malice" in turning over the infamous opposition research dossier to authorities.
(AP)

Cohen filed the suit against Fusion GPS' parent company in January, saying that the dossier falsely reported that he had traveled to the Czech Republic during the Presidential campaign on behalf of then-candidate Trump. The dossier made its way to federal authorities in 2016, and Buzzfeed News published it in January 2017. (Cohen filed a separate action against Buzzfeed.)

The complaint was filed one day before a year had passed from the Buzzfeed publication. In the new Motion to Dismiss, Fusion GPS says that Cohen's suit acknowledged that the publication was out of the control of Fusion GPS, and also that Fusion GPS had not taken any actions after November 2016. Citing case law, Fusion GPS thus argues that the one-year deadline to file the case passed in November 2017.

U.S. District Court Judge J. Paul Oetken today gave Cohen's attorneys until April 27 to respond.*



*Fusion GPS attempted to file the Motion to Dismiss on March 30, however some filing problems with the Court prompted them to re-file it April 11.

(Occasionally, Arizona's Politics comes across interesting items that are not directly related to Arizona politics, but warrant publishing. This is one of those items.)

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