United States Court of Appeals For the Eighth Circuit ___________________________ No. 20-2710 ___________________________ Devin G. Nunes, lllllllllllllllllllllPlaintiff - Appellant, v. Ryan Lizza, lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant - Appellee, Hearst Magazine Media, Inc., lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant - Appellee. ____________ Appeal from United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa - Western ____________ Submitted: April 14, 2021 Filed: September 15, 2021 ____________ Before SMITH, Chief Judge, COLLOTON and ERICKSON, Circuit Judges. ____________ COLLOTON, Circuit Judge. Devin Nunes, a Member of Congress from California, appeals an order of the district court dismissing his complaint alleging defamation and conspiracy claims against Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. The claims are based on an article published in Esquire magazine. Although we agree that there are insufficient allegations of express defamation, we conclude that the complaint does state a claim for defamation by implication as to a republication of the article. We thus affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand for further proceedings. I. Representative Nunes has been a Member of Congress since 2003, and he serves as the Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He worked on his family’s farm in California as a child, and later owned farmland with his brother. In 2006, the Nunes family sold its farmland in California, and the Congressman’s parents and brother moved to Sibley, Iowa, where his father purchased a dairy farm, NuStar Farms. According to the complaint, the farm is operated by the Congressman’s family without his involvement, and the Congressman has no financial interest in the farm. On September 30, 2018, Esquire magazine (then owned by Hearst) published an article about Representative Nunes and the farm. Lizza authored the piece. The online version is entitled “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.” The print version is entitled “Milking the System,” and includes a caption that asks two questions about a Congressman who has “spun himself as a straight talker whose no-BS values are rooted in his family’s California dairy farm”: “So why did his parents and brother cover their tracks after quietly moving the farm to Iowa? Are they hiding something politically explosive?” The article maintains that Representative Nunes and his family hid the fact that the family farm is now in Iowa. The article states that Nunes (1) “has a secret” and (2) that “he and his parents seemed to have concealed basic facts about the family’s move to Iowa.” The article describes how his parents, “Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, . -2- . . used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley,” and declares it “strange . . . that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade.” The article ponders: “Why would the Nuneses, Steve King, and an obscure dairy publication all conspire to hide the fact that the congressman’s family sold its farm and moved to Iowa?” When the article was published, Steve King was the Member of Congress who …
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