(Reuters) - If emeritus Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz is forced to reveal the names of donors to a legal defense fund paying some of his expenses in a defamation lawsuit against CNN, he can lay the blame on ex-Congressman Devin Nunes.

Judges, as you know, are generally not inclined to order plaintiffs to disclose granular detail about outside funding deals. But last year, a federal magistrate judge in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, ruled that Hearst Magazine Media Inc was entitled to know who was paying for close relatives of Nunes, who was at the time a Republican Congressman from California, to litigate a defamation suit over an Esquire story about the Nunes family's Iowa dairy farm.