DOVER, Del. (AP) - A Delaware judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by a longtime adviser and former Senate aide to Joe Biden over a county official’s comments about the formation of a local stock exchange.
The judge on Thursday granted New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed earlier this year by Biden confidante and Delaware Board of Trade founder Dennis Toner.
Superior Court Judge Mary Johnston said New Castle County is immune from tort claims as a governmental entity. She said Meyer also was immune from the suit because he was county executive at the time and the statement was published in his capacity as a government employee.
The judge rejected Toner’s argument that the reputational damage he purportedly suffered amounted to “property damage,” thus triggering an exception to the state law providing tort claims immunity to governmental entities and their employees.
Johnston said in her ruling that it was “unfortunate” that the case was before her.
“It appears that litigation could have been avoided if the parties had been able to sort out their differences outside the public arena,” she wrote.
The lawsuit centered on a December newspaper article quoting Meyer as saying that the founders of the Wilmington-based electronic trading platform were “probably criminal” in 2015 when they secured a controversial $3 million county government loan for their startup company. In a radio interview two weeks prior to the newspaper article, Meyer had described the loan deal as “a scam.”
While campaigning in 2016 against incumbent county executive Tom Gordon, Meyer repeatedly criticized Gordon for orchestrating and funding the loan to the DBOT despite the opposition of county council. In an advisory opinion, an outside lawyer hired by county council to investigate the loan transaction described it as “unlawful.”
The exchange struggled from its inception and generated only a handful of new jobs in downtown Wilmington, not the hundred or more that officials expected. It was sold last year, less than two years after it began trading, to a Chinese-American financial technology company called Ideanomics.
Late last year, Meyer considered and then rejected converting the county’s collateral for the loan from outdated software used by the Board of Trade to shares of Ideanomics common stock, which was trading at the time for less than a dollar per share. Ideanomics shares closed Friday at 91 cents, down four cents from the previous day and well off June’s 52-week high of $3.98.
A final interest payment and repayment of the $3 million loan principal are due in November.
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