Back in December of 2018, after a series of cancellations on Second Amendment platform NRATV, the axe came for right-wing Trump apologist Dan Bongino. The first reporting on the matter came from news outlet The Daily Beast and was accompanied by the headline: “Dan Bongino out at NRATV – BONGI-NO-MORE.” At the time Bongino refuted the report, saying that he wasn’t fired, he quit! In fact, he quit so much that he was going to launch a defamation case against the newspaper. Like every right-wing person in the media landscape, Bongino’s grasp on what law is and is not seems to be tenuous.
Bongino filed a $15 million lawsuit against the Beast in December. In August, Florida Judge Jose Martinez, appointed by George W. Bush, dismissed the case, saying that it failed to “state a claim for defamation” and the filing was “without merit.” Bongino tried to argue that the Beast’s claims that his show was canceled “insinuated” it was Bongino’s fault, and that he was downsized. I know cats that understand the law better. On Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Shaniek Maynard ruled that Bongino is on the hook for The Daily Beast’s legal fees.
Bongino bounced back and hosts a right-wing Trump insurrection radio show now. He’s been one of the right-wing media folks to find themselves muzzled after their corporate overlords started getting threatened with serious lawsuits over their evidence-free election fraud propaganda campaigns. In this case, Bongino has been ordered to pay the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP $31,835 in legal fees as they represented The Daily Beast in this frivolous lawsuit. Bongino has 14 days to file an appeal on this ruling. We will see whether or not he wants to continue down this road.
Bongino’s dismissal from NRATV was not personal. No one ever thought it was. Bongino was no more or less heinous in his promotion of misinformation and fear-driven blather. What we knew then, which has subsequently been proven, is that the financial troubles the NRA was facing were serious, and Bongino’s show was just another casualty of the mismanaging of their fearmongering, corrupt brand. It would be less than a year later that NRATV would finally be put out of its misery. Even after cutting off NRATV, the NRA has had to field an internal lawsuit from producers of one of the shows who said they were not fully paid for the work they were contracted to do by the Second Amendment scamtriots.