It turns out that Donald Trump is not only a sore loser, but also a sore winner.
A federal judge has imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions on Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others. Habba was the lead lawyer in the civil lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed in March 2022, claimed that Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and others conspired to “weave a false narrative” during the 2016 presidential election that Trump and his campaign were colluding with Russia. The civil RICO lawsuit sought more than $70 million in damages for what it claimed was an attempt to rig the 2016 presidential election in Clinton’s favor.
CNBC was the first to report on the sanctions imposed Thursday by federal Judge John Middlebrooks in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Middlebrooks had dismissed the lawsuit “with prejudice in September,
Here are some quotes from Middlebrooks’ order which imposed sanctions totaling $937,989.39 against Trump and Habba:
“We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.”
“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries.”
“He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer.”
“No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”
CNBC said other defendants in the lawsuit included former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, the research firm Fusion GPS, the former FBI officials James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, as well as Christopher Steele, the ex-British intelligence agent who authored the “Trump-Russia dossier” opposition research report before the election.
The sanctions were imposed to cover the defendants’ legal fees and costs. The amount awarded by the judge was $120,000 less than what the defendants jointly had requested.
CNBC said Clinton was awarded $171,631 in sanctions to be paid by Trump and Habba, with most of the money earmarked for Clinton’s attorneys’ fees. The order gave $179,685 to the DNC, its former chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, and a related corporation.
CNBC wrote:
The suit claimed that Clinton and other defendants falsified evidence, deceived law-enforcement agencies and engaged in other skulduggery that made “even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.”
In his order Thursday, Middlebrooks noted that Trump’s suit had “fatal substantive defects,” and that its factual allegations were undermined and contradicted by the public reports and filings upon which it purported to rely.”
The judge actually probably did Trump a favor by tossing the lawsuit. Just imagine if Trump had to give a deposition and answer questions under oath about his ties to Russia. And Trump actually did much of what he claimed Clinton had done in the 2016 election.
Trump used to be able to hire top-tier lawyers in New York and Washington, D.C. Habba runs a small law firm in Bedminster, N.J., near a Trump golf resort.
The Daily Beast, in a March 2022 story, described Habba as “the one Trump lawyer the rest of Trump’s legal team loathes.”
Some of the Trump lawyers think her work is so bad—so self-interested, pointlessly aggressive, and sloppy—that they think Habba’s mere presence on the team increases the likelihood of Trump and his family facing court losses and legal peril.
The Daily Beast cited an attorney who said that Habba seems to be filling a role previously played by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell as an attack-dog lawyer who serves as a mouthpiece for Trump. She has appeared regularly to defend Trump on Fox News and Newsmax.
She has also aggressively defended Trump in high-profile cases, including the Mar-a-Lago secret documents probe; New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ civil lawsuit against Trump and his company for allegedly engaging in fraudulent business activities, and the defamation lawsuit filed by journalist E. Jean Carroll, who claimed Trump raped her in the 1990s.