MAGA pundit Scott Jennings is facing a looming defamation suit from left-wing influencer Hasan Piker after airing a deceptively edited compilation of his Twitch streams on his nationally syndicated radio show.
Piker told Status he and his legal team are preparing a defamation suit against Jennings and Salem Media, calling a filing “unavoidable,” and that the action could expand to Fox News, where anchor Harris Faulkner cited the same compilation on air.
“This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable,” Piker said. “It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility.”
During a Tuesday segment Jennings has dubbed an “exploration of the radical socialist streamer,” he played a montage of Piker clips and claimed Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s “best friend is out there calling for Black voters to be lynched,” adding that “beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these communists.”
Jennings, who is also a CNN commentator, pushed the same claim on social media, urging followers to “listen for yourself.”
But a Snopes investigation found the clip had been stitched together from multiple separate streams and stripped of context. The underlying footage was authentic, but Piker had actually been sarcastically riffing on a viewer’s chat message — not calling for violence.
Piker argued that clip culture increasingly strips context from streamers who riff on live chat, and said Jennings “doesn’t understand the medium,” suggesting Republican operatives fed him the footage for midterm messaging.
He called Jennings “a liar” and “a hatchet man” angling for a future role in the Trump administration or GOP, and questioned why CNN keeps him on air.
“In Trump 2.0, we now traffic in lies all the time,” Piker told Status. “Just because the Republicans are trafficking in lies with regular frequency doesn’t mean that you can’t uphold some kind of editorial standard. CNN can put whoever they want to on a panel at the end of the day, but it just signals to me, and I think a lot of other people, that some of their panelists are just going to be liars.”
Jennings isn’t the only CNN contributor facing scrutiny. In July, Jonah Goldberg claimed on-air that Piker “abuses his dog on camera,” a claim Piker called defamatory, and anchor Kasie Hunt later walked back. Still, Piker said he has no plans to sue CNN itself, since Jennings’ remarks came on his unaffiliated radio show.
Jennings, Salem Media and Fox News did not respond to requests for comment, and CNN referred comment to Jennings and Salem Media.
Piker said the controversy has driven a surge in death threats, prompting him to tighten security, cut travel and scale back public appearances. “It kind of sucks,” he said, “when the news is just me.”
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