Elias firm threatens North Carolina paper with defamation suit over Roy Cooper health questions

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zerohedge.com

The Elias Law Group has threatened a North Carolina newspaper with a defamation lawsuit for asking whether the health of Roy Cooper, the 69-year-old Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, might impede him from completing his term. The North State Journal, which describes itself as the only statewide paper in the state, reports that it emailed the Cooper campaign eight times this year with questions about his health. All but two went unanswered. On the ninth inquiry, it received a cease-and-desist letter. The letter, sent on behalf of Cooper by Marc Elias' firm, warned that any suggestion the candidate is "experiencing a neurological issue," or that any health condition would prevent him from serving out his term, is "categorically false and defamatory." It then walked the paper through North Carolina's defamation law, citing a 1954 state supreme court case for the proposition that "imputing insanity or impairment of mental faculties is libelous per se," and closed with the observation that the North State Journal — "and you personally" — would be liable for any such publication. A candidate's fitness for office has been a legitimate journalistic question for a century. Franklin Roosevelt's wheelchair, Winston Churchill's strokes and, most recently, Joe Biden's visible decline were all subjects voters needed to know about before casting ballots. The question put to Cooper — can you serve the full term? — is the same one every Senate candidate faces. What has changed is the legal machinery available to suppress the question. A defamation suit against a newspaper over a health inquiry would face a steep climb under the actual malice standard that protects coverage of public figures. But the letter does not need a winning case to do its work. It needs only to make the ninth, tenth and eleventh emails more expensive than the story is worth to an editor. Elias built his practice on election litigation, a business whose volume scales with the number of disputes available to file. A press corps that pre-emptively drops health questions about its clients is cheaper than a courtroom and quieter than a correction. Cooper's campaign did not answer the first eight questions. The ninth answer came from a lawyer.