A federal judge in Florida dismissed a lawsuit filed by former President Donald Trump that blamed Hillary Clinton and others for conspiring to malign his character.
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.” It was filed in March under the civil version of a racketeering law normally used against organized crime.
The suit was amended in June to include new details from special counsel John Durham’s failed prosecution of longtime Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was accused of lying to the FBI while providing a Trump-Russia tip just before the 2016 election.
“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,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, said in a 65-page order dated Thursday.
Alina Habba, a lawyer for Trump, said the former president would appeal the ruling.
“We vehemently disagree with the opinion issued by the court today,” Habba said in an emailed statement. “Not only is it rife with erroneous applications of the law, it disregards the numerous independent governmental investigations which substantiate our claim that the defendants conspired to falsely implicate our client and undermine the 2016 Presidential election.”
The ruling comes as Trump is engaged in other legal battles in the state. Another judge in the Southern District of Florida is due to receive a filing Friday from the Justice Department and Trump lawyers proposing options for a special master to review materials seized by the FBI during its Aug. 8 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
The ruling by Middlebrooks, who in April rejected Trump’s request that he disqualify himself from the case, takes several shots at the lawsuit, noting that the theory of the case was “difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way.” He said many of the “characterizations of events are implausible because they lack any specific allegations which might provide factual support for the conclusions reached.”
The case is Trump v. Clinton, 22-cv-14102, US District Court, Southern District of Florida.
