President Donald Trump on Friday urged the Supreme Court to wade into his years-long legal battle with former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former Justice Department officials over the 2016 election, appealing a case that a lower court found to be “frivolous.”
Trump filed a lawsuit in 2022 against Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and dozens of other people and entities who he says conspired to undermine his 2016 campaign by falsely linking him to Russia.
A federal district court dismissed the suit and ultimately ruled that Trump’s lawyers were liable for nearly $1 million in penalties. The Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that ruling last year.
“This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the beginning,” wrote U.S. Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida, appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”
Trump’s case was dismissed in part because, according to the district court, his civil racketeering lawsuits were filed too late. In his appeal to the Supreme Court, the president says he made the decision to wait until he was removed from office. The appeal raises the question of whether a president’s responsibilities justify delaying certain legal deadlines while in office.
“Faced with this conspiracy during his term, President Trump concluded that any private civil action would take significant time and energy and that any civil action should therefore be postponed until after his term,” the president’s Supreme Court lawyers said, according to a copy of the appeal reviewed by CNN.
The district court “wrongly rejected the President’s theory,” Trump’s lawyers argued, “wrongly treated his arguments as evidence of nonexistent ‘bad faith,’ and relied on it to erroneously impose sanctions.”
The Supreme Court will likely decide later this year whether or not to hear the case.
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