Devin Nunes’ attorney disrupting dairy worker depositions, magazine says in court documents

A national magazine sued by Rep. Devin Nunes and his relatives is alleging in new court filings that the congressman’s attorney is interfering with depositions of employees at a Nunes family dairy, dragging out a long-running lawsuit in an Iowa court.

Attorneys for Hearst Magazines are asking a federal judge to compel employees at a dairy owned by Nunes’ relatives to disclose citizenship records and to direct Nunes’ attorney Steven S. Biss to “abide by federal and ethics rules.”

The magazine in a brief last month said Biss somehow interrupted dairy worker depositions. The documents are heavily redacted, and Biss in a reply brief contends he did nothing wrong.

“Mr. Biss’s ‘objections’ were disruptive,” Hearst’s attorneys wrote.

Much of the rest of that paragraph is redacted in publicly available court documents. Hearst’s attorneys also cited “extraordinary circumstances” and what they called Biss’s “misbehavior” in their request to Judge Mark Roberts of the U.S. District Court for Northern Iowa.

The case centers on a 2018 article published by Esquire Magazine that detailed the family dairy’s move from the San Joaquin Valley to Iowa and said the farm likely employs undocumented immigrants, which the headline described as a “politically explosive secret.” Rep. Nunes, R-Tulare, is not an owner of the dairy.

Nunes and his family members in 2019 filed separate lawsuits against Esquire, its parent company and Ryan Lizza, the journalist who wrote the piece. Nunes and his family members share the same attorney, Biss, and Nunes and his family members claim the article defamed them.

A federal judge dismissed Nunes’ lawsuit over the story in August. Nunes has appealed the ruling, putting it before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

It’s one of nine lawsuits Nunes and his campaign have filed against media organizations, online critics and the social media giant Twitter. Biss has represented Nunes in all of the cases, as well as in other lawsuits against news organizations filed by people who have worked for Nunes.

In the Nunes’ family case over the Esquire article, Hearst attorneys say Biss has provided conflicting information about whether he represents the dairy employees or just the Nunes family members who own the dairy known as NuStar.

Biss denies he ever said he’d represent the dairy workers, records show. He also says he’s looking out for the best interest of workers, who he argues Hearst’s attorneys could intimidate.

In his response to the court filings, Biss says the employees of NuStar have records of citizenship and want to testify.

“(NuStar) and their counsel are trying to protect the employees from harassment, intimidation, and outright threats by (Hearst),” Biss wrote. “(NuStar) and their counsel have facilitated the depositions because the employees want to testify and (NuStar) want to expose the truth about the Esquire article.”

Hearst counters that Biss should not make those statements if he does not represent the workers.

The Nunes family members “continue to argue that the ‘NuStar employees are fully authorized to work in the United States,’ … and ‘did nothing wrong,’ the Hearst attorneys wrote in a recent brief. “That Mr. Biss makes this argument despite not representing the employees — or providing any evidence that he or (his co-counsel) have ever spoken with any of the employees — is both baseless and troubling.”

Juries tend to be sympathetic to defamation claims because jurors can relate to having someone speak ill of them, according to James Wagstaffe, a defamation lawyer and professor at University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

But, filing a defamation suit opens the door to potentially having the plaintiff or those around them subpoenaed to testify, he said.

“You tell your client that their life is an open book. Anything in their life is generally fair game,” Wagstaffe said. “Sometimes people who sue have hubris. They don’t think they’ll get touched. They don’t tell their lawyers all the details.”