Donald Trump Files Mother Of All LOLsuits Against Hillary Clinton For Doing The RICO
As performance art, it kinda works. As a lawsuit ... not so much.
Yesterday, Donald Trump paid the $402 filing fee which allowed him to lob 108 pages of conspiratorial gobbledygook at a federal court in South Florida. Trump is suing Hillary Clinton and half the Democratic establishment in a case which styles itself as a civil RICO action. Because if you’re already courting Rule 11 sanctions, you might as well shoot for the moon.
The list of two dozen defendants includes the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton Campaign, the Perkins Coie law firm, attorney Marc Elias, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump refers to as a “Clinton loyalist.” This last piece of information would probably come as quite a surprise to Hillary Clinton.
Trump is also suing “JOHN DOES 1 THROUGH 10 (said names being fictious [sic] and unknown persons), and ABC CORPORATIONS 1 THROUGH 10 (said names being fictitious and unknown entities).” What fictitious (or “fictious”) characters and corporations will he be suing? Maybe it’s Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, because frankly a civil suit alleging a conspiracy of Oompa-Loompas would be more credible than this piece of drek.
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Here’s how it starts:
In the run-up to the 2016 Presidential Election, Hillary Clinton and her cohorts orchestrated an unthinkable plot – one that shocks the conscience and is an affront to this nation’s democracy. Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired 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.
“The scheme was conceived, coordinated and carried out by top-level officials at the Clinton Campaign and the DNC—including ‘the candidate’ herself—who attempted to shield her involvement behind a wall of third parties,” it continues breathlessly, footnoting to a Justice Department Inspector General’s Report which says nothing of the sort. Indeed, the IG report concludes that the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russian government was appropriately predicated; that it arose because Trump “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos was flapping his yap about Russia having dirt on Hillary Clinton that it would deploy to benefit Trump; and that the infamous Steele Dossier was used as the basis for FISA warrants later, but was not itself the genesis of the investigation.
None of this information appears in the complaint, because none of it supports the thesis that Hillary Clinton masterminded a scheme to compile a burn book alleging all manner of underhanded deals between Trump and Russia, hack Trump Tower, ruin his reputation, spark an FBI investigation, and torpedo his glorious presidency. Instead Trump’s lawyers have vomited out every insane conspiracy theory about 2016, connecting the Deep State to the DNC, the Clinton campaign to James Comey, and Fusion GPS to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. They were all in on it, Clinton controlled them all, and they all owe Donald Trump $72 million — i.e., $24 million times three, because Hillz did THE RICO.
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Hillary Clinton ruined poor Donald Trump’s life!
The different opportunities which evaporated are too many to list, but as an example, Donald J. Trump has been banned from different social media platforms, including Twitter. Most of this was due to the misinformation campaign waged by Hillary Clinton, whereby truth was deemed false and lies were deemed to be truth.
Funny, we remember Trump getting booted off social media after fomenting a riot and then actively encouraging his supporters as they rampaged through the halls of Congress shouting “Hang Mike Pence.” Who knew Hillary was such a svengali!
The big razzle dazzle of the pleading is the RICO allegations, of course. Except that the predicate “crimes” for them are supposedly theft of trade secrets and obstruction of justice. The first involved DNS data emanating from Trump Tower, to which securities analyst Rodney Joffe, a named defendant, had lawful access. And anyway, DNS look-up information isn’t a trade secret.
As for the obstruction of justice, the theory seems to be that Clinton and the DNC fed the FBI bad information and duped it into starting an investigation. Except that multiple named defendants here were part of the FBI, which rather undercuts the whole RICO conspiracy allegation if they weren’t actually in on it.
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The 16 enumerated counts are a grab bag of stupidity: injurious falsehood; malicious prosecution; theft of trade secrets, by which they mean metadata to which the user had been granted access; agency by Hillary Clinton who used “her agents to act on her behalf to carry out the plot against Trump”; and vicarious liability for “torturous [sic] actions by agents, servants, representatives, employees and/or contractors.”
And speaking of torture, why are all the subheadings left justified?
Clearly this is a RICO to cause legal bloggers to bleed from their eyeballs. We should probably sue Donald Trump under the doctrine of “vicious” liability.
And if you guessed that Donald Trump’s new favorite lawyer Alina Habba was the brains behind this feat of dumbassery, you are correct. She’s joined by Trump’s boarding school roommate from 1964, a divorce and personal injury attorney named Peter Ticktin, whose admission to the Florida bar and willingness to put his name on this filing are apparently qualification enough.
And it would be merely pathetic except that everyone named in this harassing POS now has to pony up cash for counsel to enter an appearance in Florida and file for a motion to dismiss.
TL;DR? It’s gross, it’s going nowhere, and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.
Trump v. Clinton [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.