Trump Appeals Million-Dollar Sanctions Order On Grounds Of ... Ummm, He'll Tell You Later

Trump litigation never dies, it just comes back with a different team of lawyers.

Donald Trump yelling

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

On Friday, Donald Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba requested a stay of the $938,000 sanctions slapped on them last month by a Florida federal judge. And today, they filed a notice of appeal of the fee-shifting order excoriating them going forward with a lawsuit which “no reasonable lawyer would have filed.”

This marks the third appeal docketed at the Eleventh Circuit since the blistering dismissal of their insane stringboard conspiracy lawsuit alleging a dastardly RICO perpetrated by Hillary Clinton, the FBI, and half of DC, and it required them to post a million-dollar supersedeas bond with the court. Although, as Judge Middlebrooks noted, part of the Trump litigation “playbook” involves massively fundraising off performative litigation, and then using PAC cash to pay lawyers — so presumably it’s all just funny money to Team Trump.

In September, the court dismissed the case in a furious order, accusing the former president of “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.” He ominously concluded by reserving “jurisdiction to adjudicate issues pertaining to sanctions.”

The plaintiffs appealed in October, but in the meantime, one of the dozens of plaintiffs moved for and received $66,000 in Rule 11 sanctions. Then all the non-governmental plaintiffs moved to get their fees reimbursed on grounds that Trump and his lawyers had forced them to draft a second round of motions to dismiss an amended complaint which was 85 pages longer and still not an iota less stupid.

Trump and Habba are represented at the Eleventh Circuit by his regular appellate lawyer Jesse Binnall, a Kraken alum made good. They already managed to get briefing delayed to February 22 after moving to consolidate the appeals of the dismissal and Rule 11 sanctions. Presumably they’ll try that trick again now, in a bid to to combine the second sanctions appeal with the prior case and put off laying any cards on the table for another several weeks.

So we’ll probably have to wait to hear how the court erred in ruling that Hillary Clinton could not possibly have conspired with her own lawyer to steal publicly available DNS lookup data to feed to the FBI in September of 2016 to retroactively get the Russia investigation started the prior July. Should be a banger!

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And PS: To anyone suggesting that Trump learned his lesson and won’t be filing any more garbage lawsuits since Judge Middlebrooks whacked him across the knuckles with his gavel, please note that the OG vexatious litigant still has plenty of dumb lawsuits in the hopper. Yes, Trump dismissed the preposterous lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James filed in Florida state court and removed to the federal docket where it promptly got assigned to Judge Middlebrooks. And he tapped out of the Second Circuit appeal of the dismissal of a separate lawsuit against the NYAG in the Northern District of New York. But he’s still suing the Pulitzer prize board in Okeechobee County; still suing CNN in federal court in Fort Lauderdale; still suing Twitter, YouTube, and Meta on the theory that they canceled his account because Rep. Adam Schiff told them to; and still threatening to sue advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan for God knows what.

Trump is going to keep filing these garbage cases until the earth falls into the sun. After which, he’ll spent whatever time’s left until the heat death of the universe appealing his losses. Take that one to the bank!

Trump v. Clinton [Docket via Court Listener]
Trump v. Clinton [Appellate Docket via Court Listener]


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

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