One America News has some good people, but the network is caught between two agendas: Kremlin propaganda and sycophancy for President Trump. On Monday, OAN doubled down on that first agenda by filing a $10 million lawsuit against MSNBC and network host Rachel Maddow.

The lawsuit is highly unlikely to succeed.

Still, OAN is energized. As my reporting colleague Mike Brest notes, OAN claims that Maddow defamed it with a July report in which she claimed OAN "really, literally, is paid Russian propaganda. Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government." OAN's legal team says those words are defamatory in that OAN is "as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and [MSNBC is] going to answer for it in a court of law."

OAN is wrong for reasons of both fact and law.

For a start, OAN and Sputnik, a western-focused Kremlin propaganda outlet, do (or recently did) share the same employee, Kristian Rouz. That alone protects MSNBC from the "actual malice" legal standard that OAN must prove in court. Namely, that MSNBC knew their claims were false, or entertained serious doubts to the claims. But that's not all.

After all, as I've explained, OAN's coverage does not simply align with Russian propaganda through Rouz. The network's reporting from Syria, for example, has at times reflected near-textbook Russian government disinformation (what the Russians regard as their special art form of "dezinformatsiya," or disinformation). More tragic, OAN's Syria coverage has supported Russian efforts to conceal deliberate chemical weapons attacks on civilian population centers. These reporting connection points, even if not coordinated, are sufficient to provide MSNBC with an almost indestructible defense to OAN's claims.

In short, OAN has a very weak case.