- October 14, 2022
A month ago US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks dropkicked Donald Trump’s insane RICO LOLsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and half of Washington DC.
“Plaintiff’s claims are not meritorious, and most are completely lacking any evidentiary support as required by the Federal Rules,” the judge wrote, describing the complaint as “a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him” and adding sua sponte, “I reserve jurisdiction to adjudicate issues pertaining to sanctiona."
And indeed, the first of the two dozen defendants in this suit has already taken Judge Middlebrooks up on his suggestion and moved for sanctions against Trump and his lawyers.
Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba, whose work came in for pointed criticism in the dismissal order, raced over to Fox to tell her tale of woe.
“When you have a Clinton judge here, Judge Middlebrooks, who I had asked to recuse himself, but insisted that he didn’t need to, that he was going to be impartial. And then he proceeds to write a 65-page scathing order where he basically ignored every factual basis which was backed up by indictments, by investigations, the Mueller report, etcetera etcetera etcetera, not to mention [Special Counsel John] Durham and all the testimony we heard there. We get dismissed,” she huffed to Sean Hannity.
She then went on to confess that she’d talked her client into filing this turkey against his own better judgment.
“The former president looked at me and he told me, ‘You know what, Alina? You’re not going to win. You can’t win. Just get rid of it. Don’t do the case.’ And I said, ‘No, we have to fight. It’s not right what happened.’ And you know, he was right,” she whined. “It’s a sad day for me personally because I fought him on it and should have listened, but I don’t want to lose hope in our system, I don’t.”
Well, yes, she should have listened. And it is sad, although, perhaps not for the reason she was suggesting.
And yet! Last night, Donald Trump noticed an appeal in this performative act of onanism on the federal docket. Of course, being Team Trump, they f*cked it up on the first try, forcing the clerk to bounce it back with notice that the document needed to be both signed and filed electronically. DOH!
But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on the lawyer for the billionaire former leader of the free world, since he only graduated from law school in 2021. As Law & Crime notes, the attorney of record is Jared Roberts, a member of the Florida bar since May of this year, and an associate at the Binnall Law Group. That would be Jesse Binnall, the Kraken alum who represents Trump on various windmill tilts, mostly unsuccessfully. Presumably he’ll be working his magic here, not the associate who happens to be barred in Florida. (Although he could hardly make a worse mess of it than Habba and Trump’s boarding school roommate Peter Ticktin).
God only knows what grounds they’re going to assert for appeal, but, we can be sure that it will be AMAZING and contribute to the full employment of legal bloggers everywhere.
Trump v. Clinton [Docket via Court Listener]