When Donald Trump threatens to sue a perceived foe, the rhetoric is often hollow. The Republican likes to occasionally try to intimidate people into submission, and his allusions to litigation — with no real intentions of follow-through — are his way of thumping his chest.
Every once in a while, though, the threats have meaning, at least to the extent that the former president and his lawyers actually file the case. That does not mean, however, that the lawsuits have merit.
Last summer, for example, Trump sued social media giants, accusing them of conspiring against him. The litigation was more of a stunt than a legitimate case, and it was dismissed.
Around the time that lawsuit was collapsing, the former president came up with a related idea: Trump sued 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 some on Fox News encouraged its viewers to take the matter quite seriously. The suit certainly 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.
Unfortunately for the former president, he will not be collecting any money through this case. Axios reported this morning:
A U.S. judge has thrown out former President Trump’s lawsuit against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, saying the former president “is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him.”
At face value, this was the obvious and inevitable resolution of a case that never should’ve been filed. As a recent Washington Post analysis explained, before the ruling was issued: “From the very beginning of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and a smattering of nearly 50 others, it becomes abundantly clear what this is about — and it’s not about winning a legal judgment. … This is a press release.”
U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks was rather explicit in endorsing this criticism.
But just below the surface, there’s a little more to this.
First, it’s worth emphasizing that American courtrooms are not supposed to be abused by politicians filing frivolous cases for no reasons. In fact, those who do open themselves up to possible sanctions — and in this case, the district court judge seemed open to that possibility.
Second, in April, Trump’s lawyers asked Middlebrooks to recuse himself from the case because he was nominated for the federal bench by Bill Clinton. The jurist obviously declined, though he raised a point at the time that’s even more interesting in hindsight. “I note that [the former president] filed this lawsuit in the Fort Pierce division of this District, where only one federal judge sits: Judge Aileen Cannon, who Plaintiff appointed in 2020,” Middlebrooks wrote. “Despite the odds, this case landed with me instead. And when Plaintiff is a litigant before a judge that he himself appointed, he does not tend to advance these same sorts of bias concerns.” In other words, when Trump and his lawyers filed this foolish case, they appear to have been “judge shopping” — a practice in which attorneys file litigation in specific courts in the hopes of getting a specific judge who’ll give them favorable treatment. When suing Clinton, Team Trump hoped the case would land in Aileen Cannon’s courtroom. And who’s Aileen Cannon? She’s the Trump-appointed judge who agreed to Trump’s request for a special master in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case — in a legal ruling that experts from the left, right and center panned as indefensible. Unfortunately for the Republican, his anti-Clinton civil case ended up in more capable hands.
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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