Government

Judge Dropkicks Trump's Insane RICO LOLsuit Against Hillary Clinton, Reads His Lawyers For Filth

Love the smell of Rule 11 sanctions in the mornin'.

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Math Is Hard TrumpIs it bad when a federal judge announces sua sponte “I reserve jurisdiction to adjudicate issues pertaining to sanctions?” Asking for Alina Habba and Peter Ticktin, the lawyers who just got their asses kicked by US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks in his order dismissing Donald Trump’s insane RICO LOLsuit against Hillary Clinton and half of DC.

“Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner,” the court begins. “It was certainly not presented that way. Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here.”

And indeed the 65-page order is a careful vivisection of this misbegotten attempt to package the former president’s various grievances into a vast criminal conspiracy by disparate actors bent on his destruction. Or as Judge Middlebrooks put it, “What the Amended Complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this complaint, filed by Habba, a civil litigator from New Jersey, and Ticktin, whose main qualifications appear to be his license to practice in Florida and having been young Donald Trump’s roommate at boarding school, was hot garbage. Their theory was that Hillary Clinton and the DNC conspired with James Comey and Rod Rosenstein to do THE RICO to Donald Trump by starting an FBI investigation of his ties to Russia. It was, as Judge Middlebrooks described it, a “quintessential shotgun pleading,” with hundreds of unrelated allegations, many of them false or misleading, bootstrapping each other into a theory supported neither by facts nor law.

The causes of action are frankly too stupid to rehash again. In short, there was no predicate for a civil RICO action because accessing public web traffic data is not theft of trade secrets. And there was no malicious prosecution because there was no prosecution at all, malicious or otherwise. Also, statutes of limitations aren’t really, like, negotiable.

The whole exercise was a massive waste of the court’s time and resources, and Judge Middlebrooks could not be clearer in expressing his disgust:

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.

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Not to mention the millions of dollars in legal fees incurred by the two dozen defendants who had to find local counsel to respond in Florida, a venue to which almost none had any connection.

Here, Plaintiff has not alleged that Defendants “aimed” any conduct at Florida or could reasonably have anticipated that Plaintiff would be harmed in Florida, particularly in light of the fact that Plaintiff was a resident of New York at the time of the occurrences giving rise to Plaintiff’s claims. Knowledge that Florida is a state in the United States does not equate to knowledge that Defendants’ actions will have consequences in Florida.

The dismissal is full of ominous criticism of the lawyers who filed it. The court excoriates them for dumping this overlong monstrosity on his docket — “To say that Plaintiff’s 193-page, 819-paragraph Amended Complaint is excessive in length would be putting things mildly.” — and chides them for larding it with “293 footnotes containing references to various public reports and findings.”

“[I]f a party chooses to include such references, it is expected that they be presented in good faith and with evidentiary support,” the judge writes. “Unfortunately, that is not the case here.”

Judge Middlebrooks is also furious at what could only be described as misrepresentations of facts and law. For instance, Trump refers repeatedly to a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General to support his allegation that the FBI acted in bad faith when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into his campaign’s coordination with Russian efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election. In fact, the report found that the investigation was appropriately predicated and not opened due to political bias, much less an effort to harm the future president.

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“Plaintiff and his lawyers are of course free to reject the conclusion of the Inspector General,” Judge Middlebrooks writes. “But they cannot misrepresent it in a pleading.

Similarly, Trump’s lawyers point to Special Counsel John Durham’s prosecution of former DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann to support their claims of a DNC plot, without mentioning once that he was acquitted. They also fail to mention that the FBI investigation had nothing to do with Sussmann, and was kicked off by Trump’s campaign staffer George Papadopoulos drunkenly bragging to an Australian diplomat that the Russians had Hillary Clinton’s emails and would release them to help Trump, weeks before they did exactly that.

To say that the court was unimpressed with these omissions would be rather understating the point.

In presenting a pleading, an attorney certifies that it is not being presented for any improper purpose; that the claims are warranted under the law; and that the factual contentions have evidentiary support. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 11. By filing the Amended Complaint, Plaintiff’s lawyers certified to the Court that, to the best of their knowledge, “the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law,” and that “the factual contentions have evidentiary support[.]” Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b)(2). I have serious doubts about whether that standard is met here.

“Plaintiff’s claims are not meritorious, and most are completely lacking any evidentiary support as required by the Federal Rules,” Judge Middlebrooks writes.

Unsurprisingly, the court denies the former president and his lawyers leave to amend: “It is not simply that I find the Amended Complaint ‘inadequate in any respect’; it is inadequate in nearly every respect.”

It’s a stark contrast with his Southern District of Florida colleague, who not only entertained a pleading with similar “glaring structural deficiencies” from Donald Trump’s, umm, unorthodox counsel, but actually granted the request. And since Trump pretty clearly tried to get this pathetic exercise in onanism on Judge Aileen Cannon’s docket, we can only imagine the chaos she’d have unleashed if they’d gotten their way.

Good riddance. And good luck to Trump’s lawyers with whatever shit comes their way for such a gross abuse of the federal judiciary.

Trump v. Clinton [Docket via Court Listener]

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

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