Trump’s lawsuit against Clinton on Russia allegations has been dismissed by the judge.
A federal court in Florida has rejected a lawsuit brought by former President Donald Trump. The suit claimed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others had colluded to smear his reputation.
It was filed in March under the civil version of a racketeering law that is normally used against organized crime. Trump’s suit accused more than two dozen defendants of orchestrating “a malicious conspiracy to disseminate patently false and injurious information about Donald J. Trump and his campaign, all in the hopes of destroying his life, his political career, and rigging the 2016 Presidential Election in favor of Hillary Clinton.”
The lawsuit was amended in June to include new details from the unsuccessful prosecution of longtime Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann by Special Counsel John Durham. Michael Sussmann was accused of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while providing a tip about Trump and Russia just before the 2016 election. The prosecution was unsuccessful.
“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,” US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who was appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, said in a 65-page order dated Thursday.
A second judge in the Southern District of Florida is scheduled to receive a filing on Friday from the Justice Department and lawyers representing Trump. The filing is expected to propose various options for a special master who would review the materials that were seized by the FBI during their search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8.
In his ruling, Middlebrooks, who in April denied Trump’s request that the judge recuse himself from the case, takes several shots at the lawsuit, pointing out that the theory of the case was “difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner.” Trump had requested that Middlebrooks recuse himself from the case. He said that many of the “characterizations of events are improbable since they lack any particular claims which may offer factual basis for the conclusions reached.” This was not presented in this manner at all.
The lawsuit did not seek “redress for any legal injury,” according to the judge who said that the court was “not the right venue” for the concerns made by the former president.
The lawsuit addresses a comprehensive list of complaints that the Republican former president frequently voiced during his four years in the White House after defeating Hillary Clinton. It was filed at a time when he proceeded to assert that his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2020 election was the result of widespread election fraud.
In a 108-page lawsuit that was filed in a federal court in Florida, the former president alleged that the defendants “maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.” “Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” the former president said.
Both compensatory and punitive damages were requested in the lawsuit. Trump stated that he was “forced to incur expenses in an amount that is to be determined at trial, but known to be in excess of twenty-four million dollars ($24,000,000) and continuing to accrue, in the form of defense costs, legal fees, and related expenses.”
Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer for the British government, is one of the defendants in the case that Trump has filed.
The unverified claims that Russia had embarrassing information about Trump and some of his Republican campaign advisers and that Moscow was working behind the scenes to defeat Clinton were included in a dossier that was written by Steele and distributed to the FBI and various media outlets prior to the election in November of 2016. The dossier was also distributed to media outlets.
A committee in the United States Senate that was chaired by Republicans and produced a report of 966 pages in 2020 came to the conclusion that Russia attempted to assist Donald Trump in winning the 2016 election by using Republican political operator Paul Manafort and the website WikiLeaks.
Manafort contributed to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 for a period of five months.
The United States has been conducting an investigation into allegations of election meddling by Russia, which has been going on for the last two years and is being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
In 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller presented a comprehensive report that described multiple connections between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. However, no one associated with the Trump campaign was charged with participating in a criminal conspiracy.
According to what is said in the report compiled by Mueller, “the Russian government felt it would benefit from a Trump administration and attempted to ensure that result,” and “that the campaign anticipated it would gain electorally from material obtained and disclosed via Russian activities.”
