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Aug. 29, 2024 |  By: Paul Wagman - Missouri Independent

St. Louis judge sets trial date for defamation case against Gateway Pundit

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By Paul Wagman - Missouri Independent

A St. Louis judge this week set a trial date of next March 10 for the defamation lawsuit against the owners of the far-right conspiracy site Gateway Pundit over false allegations of election fraud against two Georgia poll workers.

Although trial schedules can always be amended, the Aug. 26 order by Judge Elizabeth Hogan appears to finally bring clarity to the question of when St. Louis will be the scene of what will be a high-profile First Amendment trial.

It’s also a setback for Jim Hoft, owner of the Gateway Pundit, who had hoped for an indefinite delay in the proceedings.

The case pits the claims of the two poll workers that the Gateway Pundit’s “one-hundred-plus article campaign” against them helped prompt death threats and other harassment against Hoft’s claims that he acted only as a journalist exercising his right to free expression.

The March 10 date is the one requested by the lawyers for the two poll workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who are mother and daughter.  It is also the one that had been recommended by a court-appointed “special master” in the case and that the court itself had set earlier in the year.

But the lawyers for Hoft and his co-defendants — his identical twin brother Joe Hoft and TGP Communications LLC, the business behind the Gateway Pundit website — requested a stay while they appeal the July 24 dismissal of TGP’s bankruptcy filing by a Florida bankruptcy court.

In an Aug. 22 filing, Hoft’s attorneys argued that the St. Louis court should extend the automatic stay that had been placed on the case when they made their initial bankruptcy filing in April. This strategy, they said, would avert possible “stops and starts” that could flow from a reimposition of the bankruptcy proceeding and another automatic stay.

Hoft’s lawyers also said the two women and their lawyers “are clearly on a mission to drive TGP Communications out of business, and seeking bankruptcy protection in the face of that mission” makes sense.
But in tossing the filing, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of Florida ruled that it had been made in “bad faith” and “purely as a litigation strategy.”

The lawyers for the poll workers took note of that in their request for the March 10 trial date.

They wrote that Hoft and his attorneys have “used every option to delay justice” since the case was first filed in December 2021, “including through 1) improper removal to federal court; 2) filing a defamation counterclaim against counsel of record for repeating facts and opinions included in the operative petitions; 3) failing to produce many responsive documents until more than a year after they were requested; and 4) failing to provide defendants’ depositions dates until ordered to in April 2024.”

They also wrote that Hofts’ lawyers had “not responded” to their multiple attempts to meet to discuss how to comply with the schedule the special master had laid out for discovery and depositions in the case.

A similar suit by Freeman and Moss against former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani led a Washington, D.C., jury last December to award them compensatory and punitive damages of more than $148 million. Guiliani’s lawyer in that case contended that the Gateway Pundit – whom he called “patient zero” of the election fraud conspiracy theory – was more responsible than his client for the lies.

The trial in St. Louis will also be before a jury.

Reached by email, John C. Burns, the Hofts’ St. Louis-based lawyer, said he had no comment.