US President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene in his long-running legal dispute with former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and several former Justice Department officials over the 2016 presidential election. The appeal challenges a lower court’s dismissal of the case, which one judge described as “frivolous.”
Trump filed the lawsuit in 2022 against Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and dozens of other individuals and organisations. He accused them of conspiring to damage his presidential campaign by falsely linking him to Russia.
However, a federal district court dismissed the suit and later ordered Trump’s lawyers to pay nearly $1m in sanctions. The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, largely upheld the ruling last year.
In dismissing the case, US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida, who was nominated to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, criticised the legal action.
“This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start,” Middlebrooks wrote. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”
One of the grounds for dismissing the lawsuit was that Trump’s civil racketeering claims had been filed outside the permitted time limit, according to the district court.
In his latest appeal, Trump argues that he deliberately waited until he had left office before pursuing the case. His legal team contends that the responsibilities of the presidency justified delaying the lawsuit and raises the question of whether certain legal deadlines should be paused while a president is in office.
According to a copy of the appeal reviewed by CNN, Trump’s lawyers told the Supreme Court that he had considered the demands of his presidential duties when deciding not to initiate private civil litigation during his term.
“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.
Trump’s legal team also challenged the lower court’s decision to impose sanctions, arguing that the judge wrongly interpreted their legal position as evidence of improper conduct.
The president’s attorneys maintained that the district court had made an error in rejecting his argument for delaying the lawsuit and subsequently penalising his legal team.
The appeal stated that 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 case centres on Trump’s allegations that Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and others worked together to undermine his 2016 campaign through claims linking him to Russia. The lower courts rejected the lawsuit, while the latest appeal seeks to challenge both the dismissal and the financial penalties imposed on his lawyers.
Trump is asking the Supreme Court to review the lower court’s handling of the case, particularly its decision on the filing deadline and the sanctions against his legal team.
