Nina Jankowicz became the focus of criticism last year when she was picked to lead the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board.
Jankowicz is now attempting to raise $100,000 for a lawsuit against Fox News. Yet according to George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, she may have other plans for the money.
Lawsuit faces major legal hurdles
Turley wrote on his blog last week that Jankowicz “faces considerable factual and legal challenges” given her status as a public figure.
“Under New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court crafted the actual malice standard that required public officials to shoulder the higher burden of proving defamation,” he explained.
“Under that standard, an official would have to show either actual knowledge of its falsity or a reckless disregard of the truth,” the legal scholar pointed out.
What’s more, Turley stressed that “it is not clear how $100,000 could even fund the initial stage of a lawsuit against Fox” while “[t]here is no guarantee that it would be used for that purpose.”
Jankowicz promoted false narrative regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop
Fox News lied about me hundreds of times to tens of millions of people. Help me hold them accountable for the harm they do.https://t.co/m7O8m50OPmhttps://t.co/4K7RgedI90
— Nina Jankowicz (@wiczipedia) March 2, 2023
Turley then went on to note that despite portraying herself as an enemy of misinformation, Jankowicz has repeatedly trafficked in it.
As an example, he pointed to a tweet from October of 2020 when she argued that a Time magazine article cast “yet more doubt” on the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
Lots of news yesterday, so initially missed this piece by @shustry casting yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.
In 2019, people in Ukraine were trying to sell access to alleged Biden emails for $5 million. https://t.co/khn5TVrMRW
— Nina Jankowicz (@wiczipedia) October 22, 2020
Mainstream media has conceded that laptop is genuine
In another tweet, Jankowicz insisted that Biden’s “emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign.” She added, “Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.”
Not to mention that the emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a fairly tale about a laptop repair shop.
— Nina Jankowicz (@wiczipedia) October 22, 2020
However, Fox News pointed out in November that even mainstream media outlets like CBS News have since acknowledged that the contents of Biden’s laptop were genuine.
Jankowicz has also been critical of efforts to reduce online censorship, telling NPR, “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities.”