New York Times: Judge Axes Exxon’s Defamation Suit Against Environmentalists

By Karen Zraick

A federal judge in Texas has dismissed Exxon Mobil’s bombshell defamation lawsuit against environmental groups that it had accused of trying to sabotage its recycling business in collusion with an Australian mining magnate.

But the judge allowed a parallel case against California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, to proceed.

[ . . . ]

Mr. Bonta had claimed immunity from lawsuits because of his position as a public official. Judge Truncale went through a list of Mr. Bonta’s statements, including media interviews and a campaign fund-raising email.

The campaign email, for example, was “not within Bonta’s scope of employment,” leaving him unable to claim official immunity, the judge said.

Ashkhen Kazaryan, a senior legal fellow at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University, said Judge Truncale’s decision raised alarm bells. By holding that Mr. Bonta had lost immunity when one of his statements appeared in a campaign email, the court created a template that could be used against other officials, she said. The line between speech that is part of one’s official duties and speech in the context of a political campaign “will be very difficult to draw consistently in the modern media environment,” she said.

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