By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
While his opponents deflect Donald Trump’s lie that he won in 2020 and brace for his cries of “Fraud!” if he loses next month, Trump’s lawyers are telling a federal appeals court that Democratic conspirators tried to rig the 2016 presidential election against him.
And that was his successful campaign, meaning the ex-president will never stop battling the evils he says plagued him in 2016 and 2020. The year 2024 promises more of the same because even if he wins, Trump says, he’ll pursue his critics.
Psychologist Mary Trump says her Uncle Donald never forgets or forgives a slight, especially from a woman, and he makes grievance politics “an art form.”
The same holds true for grievance litigation. Plus, Trump’s non-criminal conspiracy case has a built-in financial incentive: A winning plaintiff gets triple damages. How attractive that must be to an embattled businessman who constantly monetizes his brand by hawking everything from bitcoins to Bibles.
Two years ago U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of West Palm Beach slammed Trump’s 2016-era racketeering lawsuit as “frivolous,” found he’d waited too long to sue, and drop-kicked his case to the courthouse curb.
“This case should never have been brought,” the judge wrote.
He ordered Trump and his lawyers Peter Ticktin of Deerfield Beach and Alina Habba of Bedminster, New Jersey, to pay a total of about $1 million. It’s an unusually severe sanction for waging lawfare against Hillary Clinton and 30 other Democrats and their associates: former FBI Director James Comey, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Russian intelligence analyst Igor Danchenko, who was a source for the controversial Steele dossier, etc.
“Thirty-one individuals and organizations were summoned to court, forced to hire lawyers to defend against frivolous claims. The only common thread against them was Mr. Trump’s animus,” Middlebrooks wrote. He “deliberately misrepresented public documents by selectively using some portions while omitting other information including findings and conclusions that contradicted his narrative.”
A LEGAL ‘MASQUERADE’
“These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims. This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda,” Middlebrooks wrote.
“But the courts are not intended for performative litigation for purposes of fundraising and political statements,” he noted. “It is harmful to the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources that should be directed to real harms and legitimate legal claims.
“The judiciary should not countenance this behavior and it should be deterred by significant sanctions,” he wrote.
Trump’s appeal of Middlebrooks’s rulings in Trump v. Clinton, still in early stages after eight months at the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, is on track to outlast the presidential campaign. And Trump has a shot at reviving his case, at least in part, according to Robert Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie.
“I think Middlebrooks was right, this was never a civil RICO case,” he said, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, the basis for the main claim in Trump’s lawsuit.
“You need a lot of proof and they never had it. Just because you can name lots of people does not mean that those people were in an actual conspiracy and were working toward a common goal,” Jarvis said.
Still, in his opinion, Trump may have an arguable defamation claim targeting the most salacious parts of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. Jarvis referenced a notorious, unproven account of a 2013 Trump trip to Moscow involving hookers and a kinky sex act in a hotel room.
“It’s hard to imagine Trump’s reputation being besmirched but that would besmirch his reputation,” Jarvis said, adding that Trump may want to clear his name “both for his legacy and for his children.”
“I could see the 11th Circuit, on this issue of libel or some other discrete issue,” sending the case back to Middlebrooks to consider whether a trial is warranted, he said. The 11th Circuit is heavily conservative; Middlebrooks is a 1997 appointee of President Bill Clinton.
THE STEELE DOSSIER
A defamation trial would test the veracity of the Steele dossier, a compilation of political opposition research that has obsessed Trump ever since it was leaked to BuzzFeed News and widely publicized 10 days before his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Most of the document describes collusion between Trump’s team and the Russian government to achieve their shared objective of putting him in the White House.
Initially a bigtime Republican donor subsidized Steele’s Trump-Russia project, according to media reports. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website backed by hedge fund manager Paul Singer, hired Fusion GPS, a research firm that later retained Steele, The New York Times reported on Oct. 27, 2017.
Steele went on to produce the dossier for Democrats seeking intel about Trump’s Russia links. The MAGA faithful believe that Hillary Clinton, the DNC and the rest of the “deep state” paid for and manipulated the report to make Trump look bad.
In interviews Steele insisted his report – he rejects the term “dossier” – was no more than raw data, a collection of “unverified, and potentially unverifiable,” memos he considered “a starting point for further investigation.”
Nevertheless, over time the 35-page document heavily influenced the national conversation about Trump’s Russia connection. It figured into reports by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Inspector General and, most recently, Special Counsel John Durham. He conducted a four-year probe of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, that began in July 2016.
In Durham’s final report released on May 15, 2023, he blasted the FBI for, among other missteps, relying on the Steele dossier, saying the agency “did not and could not corroborate any of [its] substantive allegations.” But Durham didn’t unearth evidence of a deep state plot against Trump, The Guardian newspaper reported; his investigation, which cost more than $6.5 million, ended with a whimper.
DURHAM REPORT REVISITED
Still, in the 11th Circuit RICO appeal, Trump’s lawyers are using Durham’s critique of the Steele dossier to bolster their argument that Middlebrooks was wrong to label Trump’s lawsuit “frivolous,” dismiss it permanently, and order sanctions.
Throughout the litigation, Trump’s lawyers have been trying to drag Steele’s British company, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., into court. They couldn’t convince Middlebrooks that the “long arm” authority in Florida law stretches far enough to reach Orbis; they’re trying again in the 11th Circuit.
Trump’s Miami lawyer Richard Klugh acknowledged Steele’s importance to the case in a July 1 motion. “Public record, not least of which is established through the Durham Report, illustrates Orbis’s malicious conduct against [Trump],” he wrote.
The Steele dossier “was ultimately provided to the FBI. As was intended by each defendant, it was rife with knowing falsehoods and fabricated information. … But for Orbis’s conspiratorial actions, the fraudulent Steele Dossier would have never existed.”
Klugh was responding to a motion by Orbis’s Miami lawyer at the time Enjolique Lett. “Trump’s goal is not to obtain any legitimate legal redress of harm, but to file knowingly baseless claims in order to weaponize legal systems against a party – particularly Orbis here – to waste its resources,” she wrote.
“Such behavior should not be countenanced,” Lett wrote, echoing Middlebrooks. Orbis demanded double its costs in sanctions. Lett was sworn in as a U.S. Magistrate in September. No new attorney for Orbis has appeared in court.
The 11th Circuit has not yet ruled on Orbis’s sanctions motion.
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