also found<\/a> that U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of Southern Florida did not err when he sanctioned Trump and his then-lawyer and now-acting New Jersey U.S. Attorney Alina Habba and ordered them to pay $937,989.39 for their “bad faith” arguments.<\/p>\nThe suit had alleged that in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Clinton conspired with others to \u201cweave a false narrative\u201d about Trump and Russia, to \u201cdiscredit, delegitimize and defame\u201d him. <\/p>\n
Middlebrooks found that the suit was filled with frivolous claims, including a \u201cmalicious prosecution claim without a prosecution,\u201d and a \u201ctrade secret claim without a trade secret.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,\u201d Middlebrooks wrote. He said the suit was intended to “harass” and was being used \u201cfor a political purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n
The then-former president, he said, knew better. <\/p>\n
\u201cMr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions,\u201d Middlebrooks wrote, finding that \u201csanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said it \u201ccontinues to fight back against all Democrat-led Witch Hunts, including the \u2018Russia, Russia, Russia\u2019 hoax.”<\/p>\n
“President Trump will continue to pursue this matter to its just and rightful conclusion,\u201d the spokesman said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld an almost $1 million penalty against President Donald Trump and his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-315628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}