President Donald Trump brought up his successful lawsuit against CBS News during an interview on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, telling host Norah O'Donnell they had to pay him "a lot of money."
Two of the Supreme Court's conservative justices criticized the majority’s decision not to take up attorney Alan Dershowitz’s defamation case against CNN, saying the high court missed an opportunity to revisit a controversial 1960s defamation precedent.
The dissent from the court’s conservative wing effectively called on the justices to revisit longstanding libel precedent, echoing President Donald Trump’s 2016 calls to loosen U.S. libel laws.
Dershowitz, who has represented famous figures like Trump, O.J. Simpson and Leona Helmsley, claimed CNN deceptively edited a snippet of his defense during Trump’s first impeachment trial about "quid pro quo[s]" to make it sound like he said the opposite of his fuller statements and used that clip to damage his reputation.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — appointees of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Trump, respectively — criticized their colleagues for relying on the "actual malice" standard in evaluating whether CNN defamed Dershowitz, arguing the standard is not rooted in the Constitution and instead was created in the Supreme Court's landmark 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.
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"Predictably, Dershowitz did not prevail under that exacting standard, which this Court created in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Dershowitz now asks this Court to overrule Sullivan and related precedents," the conservatives wrote.
Dershowitz also reacted to the dissent in remarks to Fox News Digital, calling the majority's standard "impossible" to overcome.
"But the majority ruled, over dissents, th
