Government

Clinton Files Motion To Dismiss Trump's RICO LOLsuit On Grounds Of WTF Even Is This Sh*t

Bro, do you even law?

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Hillary Clinton Testifies Before House Select Committee On Benghazi Attacks

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

A month ago, Donald Trump filed the mother of all LOLsuits, accusing Hillary Clinton of masterminding a RICO conspiracy with half the Democrats in DC “to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.”

“The actions taken in furtherance of their scheme—falsifying evidence, deceiving law enforcement, and exploiting access to highly-sensitive data sources – are so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison,” it screeched, before launching into a recitation of mostly conclusory allegations about a scheme to destroy the former president’s reputation by connecting him with Russia (“if you’re listening”), culminating in his getting kicked off Twitter.

Were you under the impression that Trump got booted off social media because he used it to foment an insurrection? Wrong! It was part of the #ClintonBodyCount. But if you guessed that this was an Alina Habba joint, you were totally correct.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton’s legal team from Williams & Connolly fired back with a motion to dismiss on the grounds that all of this is complete and total bullshit.

“Whatever the utility of Plaintiff’s Complaint as a fundraising tool, a press release, or a list of political grievances, it has no merit as a lawsuit, and should be dismissed with prejudice,” it begins, before methodically picking apart each and every one of the allegations in the complaint.

Most notably, they point out that “all of Plaintiff’s claims accrued no later than October 29, 2017;” Trump tweeted about them at the time, confirming he had actual, contemporaneous knowledge; “notwithstanding his rousing, all-caps call to action, Plaintiff waited four years, four months, and twenty-four days before filing suit;” and thus the statute of limitations for civil RICO, which is four years from the time the injury was discovered, had already tolled when Trump filed this turkey.

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Ditto for the two-year statute on the Florida “injurious falsehood” business liability claim Trump hoped to avail himself of by docketing this clunker in Florida.

The motion to dismiss — as competently drafted as Trump’s complaint was not that — points out that the plaintiff has failed to plead a predicate act to justify the RICO claim. The supposed “theft” of “trade secrets” from a server located in Trump Tower fails, since (a) the information was legally accessed, and (b) there’s no expectation of privacy in DNS look up information, and it’s certainly not a trade secret.

As for the supposed witness tampering when attorney Michael Sussmann gave the (possibly massaged) server data to the FBI, even accepting the allegations in the complaint, an investigation which doesn’t result in charges isn’t an official proceeding that can be “tampered” with. So that one can’t be a RICO predicate either.

“Plaintiff’s core grievance against Hillary Clinton is the practice of politics, and cannot support this legal claim,” the motion continues, noting that it is bloody rich for Donald freakin’ Trump to complain about mean tweets.

Plaintiff can hardly claim to be a stranger to the rough-and-tumble tone of political rhetoric. See supra, p. 2–3; see generally The Trump Twitter Archive, thetrumparchive.com (collecting Plaintiff’s tweets).

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There are also a couple of fun little Easter eggs in there for people who have slogged through five years of this performative junk litigation. (It me!)

The complaint cites a lawsuit by MAGA loon Larry Klayman, the OG vexatious litigant, for the principle that “no amount of repeating the word ‘malice’ will overcome the constitutional requirement” to plead actual malice under the NYT v. Sullivan standard. And it name checks Trump’s longtime supporter and the current CEO of his disastrous social media platform, former congressman Devin Nunes, who sued the company which produced the Steele Dossier. Nunes’s “RICO” case alleging that he was damaged by having to expend resources to “publicly address” a “smear campaign” by Fusion GPS was tossed by a federal court in Virginia for being total bullshit.

So if Trump wants a preview of how this thing is going to go down, he can just summon that doofus who sued a Twitter cow to Mar-a-Lago for a little preview.

Trump v. Clinton [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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