A couple of months ago, Donald Trump boasted via his social media platform about his team’s successes in courtrooms. “These vicious Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Democrats have attacked my lawyers at a level never seen before,” the former president wrote, “and yet I keep on winning.”
In reality, Team Trump keeps on losing, including suffering another embarrassing setback late last week. Newsweek reported:
A judge in Florida handed down a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump and one of his attorneys on Friday, accusing the former president of attempting to use the courts to “seek revenge on political adversaries.”
I’ve been keeping an eye on this case for a long while — even by Republican standards, it’s a doozy — so let’s revisit our recent coverage and review the basics.
It was in March 2022 when Trump had the bright idea of suing Hillary Clinton and several other Democrats, alleging they tried to rig the 2016 presidential election by bringing attention to his Russia scandal. The case, believe it or not, alleged “racketeering” and a “conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood,” among other things.
By any fair measure, the lawsuit was utterly bonkers, though it had a serious goal: Trump claimed the Russia scandal cost him more than $24 million — and he wanted his legal targets to pay far more than that.
The judge in the case didn’t just reject the underlying claims, Middlebrooks could barely contain his disgust with the inanity of the legal complaint. “These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims,” Middlebrooks concluded. “This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.” He went on to cite the attorneys’ “cavalier attitude towards facts.”
With that in mind, the judge sanctioned the former president and attorney Alina Habba nearly $1 million for having filed a case that “should never have been brought.” The jurist added, “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”
Last month, as Newsweek’s report explained, Habba nevertheless refiled the lawsuit, incorporating claims from special counsel John Durham’s report on the Russia scandal investigation. This did not go well. “Even if the Durham Report uncovered the sort of vast conspiracy alleged by Plaintiff (it plainly did not), it would not change the many legal conclusions I made in the Order dismissing Plaintiff’s lawsuit,” Middlebrooks wrote. “And whatever the Durham Report can be said to have uncovered, for purposes of this case, it does not change my findings that Movants acted in bad faith in bringing this lawsuit and that this case exemplifies Mr. Trump’s history of abusing the judicial process. Therefore, for the reasons set forth below, Plaintiff and his lawyers’ Motion for Indicative Ruling Based Upon New Evidence is denied.” Habba told Fox News she might appeal. That seems like a ridiculously bad idea, but so too was filing this case in the first place. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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