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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty)
In September of 2022, Donald Trump’s insane RICO trollsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and half of DC got yeeted into the sun. In a rambling complaint characterized by the court as “difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner,” Trump sketched out a vast conspiracy by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to gin up an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russian ties.
Russia, if you’re listening …
Rejecting Trump’s claim that accessing publicly available web traffic data constituted theft of trade secrets and thus formed a predicate for a civil RICO claim, Judge Donald Middlebrooks wrote:
At its core, the problem with Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint is that Plaintiff is not attempting to seek redress for any legal harm; instead, he is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum.
Then he slapped $1 million of sanctions on Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba for abuse of the legal system.
“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions,” he wrote. “As such, I find that sanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba.”
Habba vowed to appeal, bizarrely confessing on air to Sean Hannity that she’d filed the case over the former president’s objections.
And appeal she did in June of this year, citing Special Counsel John Durham’s report:
The importance of that Report cannot be overstated. Its findings run directly contrary to the district court’s factual determinations, both in its dismissal Order and in its imposition of sanctions. While Appellees may take issue with some of the Durham Report’s findings, the Report undoubtedly shows President Trump’s claims were plausible and certainly not sanctionable. If a dispute of fact exists, that should be decided at a trial, not prematurely through a motion to dismiss and for sanctions.
John Durham famously whiffed both times he tried to prosecute someone under this extended conspiracy theory, and his report landed like … damp flatus. And indeed many of the claims made in Trump’s ill-fated complaint were directly contradicted by the Mueller Report. Nonetheless, Trump is hanging his appeal on Durham’s Report, and even while he waits for the Eleventh Circuit to intercede, Trump has now filed a motion for indicative ruling based on Durham’s natterings.
“The recent release of the Durham Report seismically alters the legal landscape of this case. While this Court previously held that President Donald J. Trump and his counsel made frivolous factual and legal allegations, the Durham Report corroborates many facts and allegations about which this Court expressed skepticism,” his lawyers wrote last week. “In fact, it bolsters several allegations that this Court seemed to dismiss as unsupported, not giving them the assumption of truth that they deserved at the motion to dismiss stage.”
They go on to promise in a footnote that, “The orders entered by this Court imposing sanctions against President Trump and his counsel raise reasonable questions as to the appearance of impartiality of the Court, and therefore a Motion to Disqualify is forthcoming.”
Motions for indicative ruling are always a long shot, and this isn’t even the only one the former president has pending. He’s currently trying to convince Judged James Donato to un-dismiss the lawsuit Trump filed against Twitter for cahootsing with Rep. Adam Schiff to deplatform him. The new information cited in that motion is Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” an even weaker reed than the Durham Report.
(Oddly enough, one of the allegations in the RICO suit is that Hillary Clinton is responsible for Trump losing his social media accounts on January 7, 2021. There’s apparently a lot of blame to go around — just none of it for Trump himself.)
So now we wait for Judge Middlebrooks to decide whether John Durham mumbling through his mustache about the need to more thoroughly vet sources before opening an investigation outweighs the gazillion other problems with this RICO suit, including that the claims are all time barred.
Or maybe Trump will just get indicted again.
Honestly, that second one seems more likely.
Trump v. Clinton [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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