President Donald Trump urged the Supreme Court on Friday to wade into his years long legal battle with former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and ex-Justice Department officials over the 2016 election, appealing a case that a lower court concluded was “frivolous.”
Trump filed the lawsuit in 2022 against Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and dozens of other people and entities he said conspired to undermine his 2016 campaign by falsely tying him to Russia.
A federal district court dismissed the suit and ultimately ruled that Trump’s attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that decision last year.
“This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start,” wrote US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida, who was nominated to the bench by former President Bill Clinton. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”
Trump’s case was dismissed in part because, the district court said, his civil racketeering claims were filed too late. In his appeal to the Supreme Court, the president argues that he made a decision to wait until he was out of office. The appeal raises a question of whether a president’s responsibilities warrant holding off on certain legal deadlines while he is in office.
“Faced with this conspiracy during his term, President Trump concluded that any private civil lawsuit would consume substantial time and energy and that any civil suit should therefore be postponed until after his term,” the president’s attorneys told the Supreme Court, according to a copy of the appeal reviewed by CNN.
The district court “erroneously rejected the president’s theory,” Trump’s attorneys argued, “improperly treated its advocacy as evidence of nonexistent ‘bad faith,’ and relied on it to mistakenly impose sanctions.”
The Supreme Court will likely decide later this year whether to hear the case.
By CNN
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