NEW YORK — A court order that Donald Trump and his lawyer must pay almost $1 million in sanctions for filing an “abusive” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton probably won’t succeed in deterring him, legal experts say.
The order was handed down Thursday by U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks in West Palm Beach, Florida, four months after the suit alleging a vast conspiracy against Trump was tossed out. The judge picked apart Trump’s allegations paragraph by paragraph, calling the case “a deliberate attempt to harass; to tell a story without regard to facts.”
The judge’s 46-page ruling is a detailed takedown of Trump’s argument about the origins of the FBI’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, which the former president claimed was cooked up by Clinton and corrupt Democrats. Middlebrooks called the lawsuit a “hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.”
