Does CNN have any self-respect at all as a journalism outfit?

House rep. Devin Nunes has filed a lawsuit against the network over not merely a biased story, but a story made up out of whole cloth.

According to the Daily Wire:

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced Friday night that he is filing a lawsuit against CNN over a report that they published the same evening that alleged an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani was willing to testify to Congress that Nunes met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor last year to discuss digging up dirt on former Vice President and current Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden. "The attorney, Joseph A. Bondy, represents Lev Parnas, the recently indicted Soviet-born American who worked with Giuliani to push claims of Democratic corruption in Ukraine," CNN reported. "Bondy said that Parnas was told directly by the former Ukrainian official that he met last year in Vienna with Rep. Devin Nunes." "Mr. Parnas learned from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin that Nunes had met with Shokin in Vienna last December," Bondy told CNN. "Nunes had told Shokin of the urgent need to launch investigations into Burisma, Joe and Hunter Biden, and any purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election." CNN claims that Bondy told them that Parnas and Nunes allegedly began communicating with each other around the time of the Vienna trip and that Parnas worked to put Nunes in contact with Ukrainian officials that could dig up dirt on Biden and Democrats in Ukraine.

He's also targeting the Daily Beast, which also reported the same pack of lies.

Now, either Nunes was at this meeting or he wasn't. This won't be hard to prove. And it's a lie so egregious that it probably can get past the tough U.S. libel laws that make it very hard for public figures to win judgments.

It's not good enough to just report the claim of a named source who claims to be willing to testify under penalty of perjury that something happened when it didn't. Who knows how this guy would testify in the face of a potential perjury rap? The point of the story was to get the garbage out there, that Nunes was as much a collaborator with Ukraine sources as House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff. A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, as the saying goes.

How does a false story like this even see print?

Nunes, as a matter of fact, has been pristine in his dealings on all of the Democratic congressional bids to oust President Trump, well above reproach. Lee Smith's new book, The Plot against the President, detailing Nunes's role in uncovering Democrat coup efforts makes that abundantly clear. That Nunes has never had Democrat-style, or any, conflicts of interest explains why most of the leftist attacks on him have been on the line of ad hominem attacks, insults directed at him because of his farming background. Unable to pin anything on him, Democrats have been reduced to putting on their cow suits and making mooing noises.

The Daily Wire notes that this phony one on Nunes follows a string of utterly false and uncorrected news stories put out by the network, solely in the interest of advancing their political agenda. The only thing that will get their attention now is court dates. Maybe a big fat judgment from an outraged jury will snap some sense into them. Right now, they're no journalism outfit; they're a Democrat smear outfit, not at all different from Media Matters with a captive airport audience. Time to get their attention.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.