Trump Suffers Embarrassing Loss Over Hillary Clinton Lawsuit

It looks like Donald Trump and Alina Habba won’t be getting out of that pesky nearly $1 million fine for filing a particularly petty lawsuit against the president’s political foes.

In a 36-page ruling Wednesday, an Atlanta-based federal appeals court panel unanimously affirmed that Trump and his lawyer had committed “sanctionable conduct” in filing a “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.

“Many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” wrote Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge William Pryor Jr., meaning that the claims were fictitious and likely intended to harass, delay, or embarrass the defendants. Pryor was joined by Trump appointee Andrew Brasher and Biden appointee Embry Kidd.

Trump had sued Clinton, Comey, and others in 2022, accusing them of a racketeering conspiracy to invent false claims that his first presidential campaign had collaborated with Russia. A district court dismissed the case in January 2023 and jointly fined Habba and Trump $932,989.39.

Pryor referred to a district court’s previous findings that Trump had made a “malicious prosecution claim without a prosecution” and a “trade secret claim without a trade secret,” among others. “Trump and Habba give us no reason to reverse the district court’s ruling that these claims were frivolous,” he wrote.

The judge also wrote that the district court “did not clearly err” in determining that Trump had shown a “pattern of misusing the courts.”

Last week, a different federal appeals court panel affirmed the dismissal of Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for using the term “the Big Lie,” calling the president’s claims “unpersuasive” and “meritless.” In September, a federal judge dismissed the president’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, stating it was chock full of “tedious and burdensome” language that had nothing to do with the case itself.