It took Jordan Liles several hours to unearth the source of what would become a series of important videos of Hasan Piker. The Snopes reporter was working to verify a 41-second clip of interspersed comments by the leftist streamer that were first posted online by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Days later, Scott Jennings, the pro-Donald Trump commentator who hosts a radio show on Salem Media and is a CNN contributor, played the clip on his radio show. He later posted it to his own X account, adding an explosive accusation that Piker had encouraged the lynching of Black Americans.
Liles sensed some context might be missing from the stitched-together video. But when he set out to investigate, he had a problem: Twitch deletes archived streams after a certain period of time, so the footage was gone from Piker’s own channel. Eventually, he found a YouTube channel whose owner devotes it to archiving Piker’s broadcasts—a fan-built paper trail that surprised him and one, he told me, he may not have been able to work without. He then went video by video, matching the clip against the archive in meticulous fashion—studying Piker’s clothing, hair, and glasses, the background objects in the scene, the camera angle, the location.
What he eventually found helped lay the groundwork for the streamer’s legal salvo against the MAGA pundit, a suit that legal experts told Status…
The rest of this story is for paid subscribers only.
Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Scoop-driven reporting and sharp-edged analysis. See why The Wall Street Journal declared Status a “must-read.”
What he eventually found helped lay the groundwork for the streamer’s legal salvo against the MAGA pundit, a suit that legal experts told Status might have merit. After months of threatening to take legal action, Piker filed the suit this week in federal court in Washington, D.C., seeking a whopping $72.5 million in damages.
Liles discovered the clip that Jennings had played on air—used to claim Piker was “out there calling for Black voters to be lynched”—contained fragments of three of Piker’s streams, stitched together out of order. Piker had been reacting to a viewer’s chat comment, and to opinions expressed by a different right-wing commentator in a separate video. His remarks about lynching were said sarcastically, mocking the commentator.
Legal experts who spoke with Status stressed that while it’s still very early in the process, Piker’s lawsuit should not be taken lightly. “It might have some legs,” Howard Wasserman, a law professor at Florida International University, told me.
Piker v. Jennings asserts defamation per se, defamation by implication, and false light. The theory behind it is fairly simple. Jennings, the complaint says, did not just mischaracterize something Piker said. Instead, the suit claims, he aired manipulated footage and then went further with an X post that “invented” a quotation. The complaint also alleges Jennings trying to damage Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee who had campaigned with Piker, and attempting to curry favor with Trump amid speculation he was in contention to become the next White House press secretary.
“Jennings took a manipulated video, put words in Hasan’s mouth that he never spoke, and then held those words up as proof of something Hasan never said or believed,” Daniel Watkins, a lawyer representing Piker, said in a statement to Status. “There is something especially disgraceful about exploiting this country’s history of racial terror to destroy another man’s reputation. Scott Jennings has every right to disagree with Hasan Piker. He has no right to invent what Hasan said. We brought this case because the truth matters, reputation matters, and there comes a point when lying must have consequences.”
Piker, however, faces a much more difficult path to winning the suit than any average person. Piker is a public figure, so he can’t win simply by proving Jennings was wrong. He has to show that Jennings knew the statement was false, or that he was reckless about whether it was. That’s usually the hard part, but at least here, Wasserman suggested Piker might have some inroads. Manipulating a video and attributing it to the wrong person is “a pretty clear factual assertion,” he told me, and it is “pretty hard to do that not intentionally.”
Wasserman explained it this way: Call someone a terrorist, and that is probably opinion, or hyperbole, and protected speech. Say that they are funneling money to a terrorist group, and then you have asserted something that you claim happened in the real world. What Jennings arguably did with the video, he said, was say: Here is a clip in which Piker said, X. In fact, that isn’t what the clip shows. Still, he said, you can expect Jennings to argue that it was all heated political rhetoric. “It’s a fine line,” Wasserman said.
Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, echoed that sentiment. She told me Piker’s complaint “tells a pretty powerful case of knowledge, the truth, and disregard for the truth.” It “certainly reads like a potentially valid defamation claim,” she said. But the question, Tushnet said, is whether the claims of distortion surrounding Piker’s words rise to the level of defamation.
Indeed, someone in Piker’s position—an extremely active political figure—may simply have to tolerate more exaggeration and hyperbole. And Tushnet told me that courts have long recognized that online speech is full of both. Another complicated question arises because Jennings has, for now, kept up his post on X and ignored Piker’s team’s demands for a retraction. Jennings could more easily claim plausible deniability and that he wasn’t acting with actual malice if he had taken either step.
In any case, whether Jennings can win a motion to dismiss—likely the first step in the legal process—by arguing hyperbole as a matter of law is hard to say, Tushnet said. And there is “such a long road” between now and any damages. But in the end, she told me, the suit is “not obvious junk.” For his part, Wasserman suggested the most likely outcome was an eventual settlement.
Jennings, for what it’s worth, has not been shy about litigation as a messaging tool. After the 2024 election, he said he didn’t have a problem with Trump suing news organizations. And this year, when Piker went off on Fox News in admittedly incendiary terms, Jennings had some advice for the network: “Time to sue.”
Jennings has not publicly addressed the lawsuit, and he did not respond to messages from Status seeking comment or whether he had selected attorneys to represent him. Still, he has remained active in his usual venues, hosting his daily radio show and appearing on-air at CNN. A spokesperson for the network referred questions to Salem Media, where a representative did not respond to a request for comment. But Jennings’ role in the matter has caused at least some people in the network’s orbit to question whether it will ever address the elephant in the room.
“Scott’s work has veered from normal political posturing into deceitful dirty political tricks,” one former CNN executive told me. “CNN should not be paying a person involved in those. It is damaging to their trustworthiness.”
