Instafired White House mistake Anthony Scaramucci took exception to being insulted in an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper. So he threatened to sue its author, bringing upon himself instant if entirely predictable injury.
Scaramucci wasn’t backing down as he took to Twitter into the night to blast anyone criticizing his legal action threats.
Scaramucci is a member of the advisory board at Tufts’ Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy. A Fletcher student tweeted, “Oh wow. An advisor to our institution, Scaramucci is threatening to sue both my classmate and our student newspaper. Honestly, I came to the U.S. hoping that I would not deal with this kind of things, that are so common in Russia.”
Scaramucci fired back, writing, “This is a dishonest tweet. I asked for an apology. Plain and simple. In our country defamation comes with its consequences.”
Ken White inflicts a papality.
Lieberman’s letter on behalf of Scaramucci is frivolous, thuggish, and an example of the modern trend of people with money believing that they should be protected from criticism through abuse of the legal system.
As I’ve discussed here many times before, only provable statements of fact can be defamatory. An opinion that does not imply a provably false statement of fact cannot be defamatory and is absolutely protected by the First Amendment.
…Scaramucci’s letter is vexatious, meritless, dishonest, and thuggish. A decent lawyer would not draft it and a decent man would not have it sent on his behalf. It represents the growing trend of the wealthy leveraging a broken legal system to suppress criticism. It is entirely consistent with Scaramucci’s past conduct as a vain, bumbling lout, and inconsistent with his attempts to rehabilitate himself. For shame.
The Tufts student newspaper! A fun thing about guys like Scaramucci is the mechanical nature of their narcissism. It’s not so much a button you push as a rope you pull, dragging down everyone else on the mountainside.