Trump Suffers Embarrassing Loss Over Hillary Clinton Lawsuit
It looks like Donald Trump and Alina Habba won’t escape that pesky nearly $1 million fine for filing a particularly petty lawsuit against the president’s political enemies.
In a 36-page decision On Wednesday, an Atlanta-based federal appeals court unanimously ruled that Trump and his lawyer engaged in “sanctionable conduct” by filing a “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.
“Many of Trump and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” wrote Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge William Pryor Jr., meaning that the the claims were fictitious and probably intended to harass, delay or embarrass the defendants. Pryor was joined by Trump appointee Andrew Brasher and Biden appointee Embry Kidd.
Trump had sued Clinton, Comey and others in 2022, accusing them of a racketeering conspiracy to fabricate false claims that his first presidential campaign collaborated with Russia. A district court dismissed the case in January 2023 and jointly fined Habba and Trump $932,989.39.
Pryor referenced a district court’s previous findings that Trump filed, among other things, a “malicious non-prosecution complaint” and a “non-trade secret trade secret complaint.” “Trump and Habba give us no reason to overturn the district court’s ruling that these allegations were frivolous,” he wrote.
The judge also wrote that the district court “did not clearly err” in determining that Trump had demonstrated a “tendency to abuse the courts.”
Last week, another federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for using the term “the big lie,” calling the president’s claims “unpersuasive” and “baseless.” In September, a federal judge dismissed the president’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Timesstating that it was filled with “tedious and tedious” language that had nothing to do with the case itself.
