Devin Nunes Was Bugged by a Parody Cow. Now It's Worse

Devin Nunes' Cow might have had only 1,200 followers as of Monday, but GOP Rep. Devin Nunes had tired of the insults it had been dishing out since August 2017. So he sued it, Twitter, and a couple of other accounts for $250 million on Monday, claiming Twitter ignored his complaints about defamatory material—defamatory material that has found a much wider audience thanks to the spotlight he shone on it. It took just a day and a slew of headlines for @DevinCow to leap ahead of the Californian's own Twitter account. The tally as of this writing: @DevinNunes has 396,000 followers; @DevinCow has 562,000.

The New York Times reports the parody account got some steam from Ellen DeGeneres Show executive producer Andy Lassner, who has over the past several days urged his 350,000-plus followers to help get @DevinCow's follower count above that of Nunes, whose family owns a dairy farm. The Washington Post reports the publicity has given rise to a new parody account, compliments of Stephen Colbert: @devinnunesskin has 42,000 followers and a single tweet: "Still thin." (More Devin Nunes stories.)