Former President Trump suffered another legal setback on Thursday when a U.S. district judge ordered him and his lead attorney to pay nearly $1 million in costs and fees to numerous defendants, including Hillary Clinton, after a Trump lawsuit was found to be baseless. .
The grim finding appears to have had immediate results: a rare Trump retreat on a related issue.
The next day, the former president’s legal team withdrew a separate action against New York Attorney General Letitia James before the same judge.
Thursday’s ruling came in response to a lawsuit Trump filed in March 2022 against Clinton, former FBI director James Comey, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former FBI figures Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and many others.
At its core, Trump accused the defendants of “malicious conspiracy” against him, especially in relation to allegations of Russian conspiracy.
The lead in the case was Trump attorney Alina Habba.
The judge, Donald M. Middlebrooks, was nominated by President Clinton in 1997 for his current position.
Middlebrooks’ 46-page statement was damning enough to have even Trump hot on his heels.
Here are the five sharpest shots from the bench against the former president.
“This case should never have been brought. It is inadequate as a legal claim was clear from the start. No reasonable attorney would have filed it. … Thirty-one individuals and entities were needlessly harmed for unfairly advancing a political narrative .”
There was no warm-up or throat clearing from Judge Middlebrooks, who began his statement with the above words.
He went on to note the background to the case and how quickly Clinton and other defendants had “established substantial and fundamental factual and legal flaws” in the Trump team’s original claim.
The judge added that the Trump team filed an amended complaint in June 2022, three months after the case began. The new and supposedly improved version “did not address any of the flaws” in the original filing, Middlebrooks writes.
Intriguingly, Middlebrooks also cites a September 2022 interview Habba gave to Sean Hannity in which she claimed that Trump encouraged her to drop the case at an earlier stage.
“And I said no, we have to fight,” Habba told Hannity.
She may regret that decision.
“Here we are faced with a lawsuit that should never have been brought, that was completely frivolous both factually and legally, and was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose. Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who repeatedly uses the courts to exact revenge on political opponents. He is the mastermind behind strategic abuse of the judicial process and cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer.”
This is an important passage in Middlebrook’s rationale for why Trump should be personally punished.
The judge cited other cases in which Trump brought cases against real or perceived opponents, including Twitter and CNN.
Middlebrooks’ point is that Trump deserves to be treated harshly because the former president has — according to the judge — a long track record of arming or hiding the justice system to sully or intimidate opponents, or for publicity purposes .
“The 819 paragraphs of the 186-page Amended Indictment are replete with immaterial, conclusive facts unrelated to any particular cause of action. Consider the inflammatory charge that Mr. Comey, the director of the FBI, conspired with Mrs. Clinton to maliciously prosecute him. Aside from the fact that Mr. Trump was never prosecuted, examine the allegations in the amended indictment regarding Mr. Comey. …
[They] do not claim that Mr. Comey launched an investigation into Mr. Trump, let alone a prosecution. And the implausible claim that Mr. Comey conspired with Mrs. Clinton, given the impact of his announcements on her 2016 campaign, is not only devoid of substance, but categorically absurd.”
In addition to his complaints about Trump trying to use the justice system for extralegal purposes, Middlebrooks is clearly annoyed by the handling of the former president’s legal team.
The Comey section goes into great detail about what Middlebrooks clearly considers pointless twists and turns — including details of Trump’s firing of Comey as FBI director.
The shrugging rejection of any collaboration between Comey and the Clinton campaign references events late in the 2016 campaign.
Comey announced in the closing days of that game that the FBI had reopened its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State in President Obama’s administration.
Comey’s public revelation is to this day blamed by some Clinton partisans for her narrow loss in the election.
“The prosecution has consistently misrepresented and singled out portions of public reports and documents to support a false factual narrative. Often the report or submission contradicted his claims. It happened too often to be a coincidence; the goal was political, not legal. Factual allegations were made without any evidence in circumstances where falsity is obvious.”
Middlebrooks cites claims made by the Trump team here, including the claim that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report “went further to exonerate” Trump from any suggestion of Russian collusion.
In fact, as Middlebrooks points out, Mueller’s conclusions were much more nuanced and ambiguous than this.
Although that claim may be acceptable as a talking point for cable news [of exoneration] is neither an accurate nor fair reading of the Mueller report,” he writes.
“Despite an affidavit from Mr. Dolan that he lived in Virginia and the fact that he was tried there, the amended indictment claimed he lived in New York. The apology of the prosecution’s lawyers: there are a lot of Dolans – some of them live in New York.”
This passage refers to Charles Dolan, a Democratic strategist who was also targeted by the Trump team.
But the judge’s comment is emblematic of a kind of tired exasperation that permeates his ruling.
In another part, he casually draws attention to a typo in a Trump team file complaining of false allegations of a “Russian clash.”
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