Former Secretary of State and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton asked a U.S. court on Oct. 31 to impose more than $1 million in sanctions on former President Donald Trump for a lawsuit that the same court dismissed in September.
“Plaintiff’s suit was unwarranted on the facts, unsupported by the law, and imposed substantial burdens both on Defendants and this Court,” Clinton and others who were sued, including Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), said in the motion for sanctions.
“Despite being alerted to the many deficiencies in the initial Complaint by one round of motions to dismiss, Plaintiff and his counsel pressed forward on an Amended Complaint that fixed none of the problems, and instead simply added more invective and irrelevant factual allegations to what was already a ‘shotgun’ pleading. The Court should not countenance the abuse of its resources—or allow significant burdens to be imposed on Defendants, many of them individuals who have devoted their careers to public service—in service of Plaintiff’s political stunt,” they added.
In a complaint lodged in March, Trump accused Clinton and around 30 others, including the people Clinton paid to compile the anti-Trump dossier, of conspiring to plot to “weave a false narrative” that Trump was colluding with Russians.
Other defendants included ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier; Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, who hired Steele on behalf of Clinton and other Democrats; and Igor Danchenko, a Russian national who has bragged that he was responsible for the bulk of the material in the dossier.
After defendants moved to dismiss the suit, Trump expanded the allegations in an amended complaint in June and added several more people, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Charles Dolan Jr., one of Danchenko’s sub-sources.
But U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, a Bill Clinton appointee, ruled in September that the complaint presented claims that “are not warranted under existing law.”
Trump appealed the determination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, while defendants began asking for sanctions.
Dolan entered the first motion for sanctions in October, pointing out that the first complaint falsely said he was a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the updated filing said he chaired a “national democratic political organization” despite the fact that he never has. In response, Trump lawyers noted that, according to special counsel John Durham, Dolan was the chairman of a national Democrat group.
Clinton, Schultz, former Clinton campaign officials John Podesta and Robby Mook, Danchenko, and others joined the motion in the Oct. 31 filing, charging that reasonable lawyers would have never filed the lawsuit, “let alone continued to prosecute it after multiple Defendants’ motions to dismiss highlighted its fundamental and incurable defects.”
The suit quoted Alina Habba, one of Trump’s lawyers, who recounted during a TV appearance that Trump told her that “you’re not going to win” after Middlebrooks declined to recuse himself.
“And I said, no, we have to fight. It’s not right what happened. And you know, he was right, and it’s a sad day for me personally because I fought him on and I should have listened, but I don’t want to lose hope in our system,” Habba added.
That quote and others like it “make clear that this suit was filed as a political tool and in order to fight back at Plaintiff’s perceived political enemies,” the sanctions motion said, claiming that the recusal motion itself was frivolous.
Middlebrooks said in his ruling that the suit was a “political manifesto outlining [Trump’s] grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum.”
The motion asks for $1.074 million to cover attorney fees, including attorneys for Clinton, Mook, and Danchenko.
“We vehemently deny the inflammatory allegations contained in the sanctions motion filed by the Clinton team. This motion, conveniently filed one week prior to election day, is nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to score political points,” Habba said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times. “This motion is particularly inappropriate, given that our client’s case will soon be reviewed by the Eleventh Circuit. We will oppose this motion and trust that the Court will see through this ruse.”
From The Epoch Times
