Former President Donald Trump’s extensive lawsuit asserting that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and several other parties colluded to create a false narrative of Trump’s campaign’s collaboration with Russia during the 2016 presidential election was dismissed by a federal judge.
Judge Donald Middlebrooks issued a stinging ruling on Thursday, declaring that Trump’s lawsuit amounted to nothing more than “a two-hundred-page political treatise documenting his complaints against those that have opposed him.”
In a court filing in southern Florida, Middlebrooks stated that the allegations of the former president “are not merely unsupported by any legal authority but manifestly precluded by binding precedent.”
Trump launched the case in March and is requesting tens of millions of dollars in damages, among other things, for alleged violations of the RICO Act, a federal statute intended to fight organized crime. It happened more than five years after Trump trounced Clinton in a savage and scandal-riddled election in which Trump’s ties to Russia were a prominent issue.
According to the lawsuit, the defendants conspired to fabricate false or deceptive proof of negative connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Numerous persons and organizations are named as defendants in the lawsuit, including Clinton, the DNC, former Clinton adviser John Podesta, the legal firm Perkins Coie, the research firm Fusion GPS, former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, and others.
Trump said that the defendants’ acts caused him to incur losses of at least $24 million. In his complaint, he demanded damages that were three times as much.
According to Middlebrooks’ ruling from Thursday, “Many of the Amended Complaint’s characterizations of events are improbable because they lack any specific charges which may give factual foundation for the conclusions reached.”
The Amended Complaint “seeks to substitute length, exaggeration, and the settling of scores and grievances for what the Amended Complaint lacks in content and legal basis,” he added.
The court agreed that Trump’s complaint was “a series of unrelated political conflicts that Plaintiff has alchemized into a broad conspiracy among the numerous persons Plaintiff perceives to have harmed him,” as described by the defendants in their response to the case.
Trump’s legal team “will immediately attempt to appeal this judgement,” according to a statement sent by his attorney Alina Habba early on Friday. In addition to ignoring “many governmental investigations which verify” Trump’s conspiracy accusations, Middlebrooks’ ruling was “rife with incorrect interpretations of the law,” according to Habba’s statement.
Russian interference in the 2016 election was confirmed by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, but there was insufficient proof of coordination with the Trump team.
The Mueller investigation has been constantly criticized by Trump as a witch hunt, one of several that he alleges have been started against him since entering politics.
