A federal appeals court upheld a $1 million penalty against President Donald Trump and his former lawyer Alina Habba for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey and others.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Trump’s 2022 lawsuit – which first came in at 108 pages and then 193 pages in an amended complaint – violated federal court rules with tenuous links between a myriad of defendants and legal claims.
“The district court decided that the amended complaint advanced legal theories foreclosed by precedent ‘that the most basic legal research would have revealed,’” reads the 36-page decision.
“Trump and Habba argue that ‘the case law is unsettled or there was a reasonable request for an extension of the law,’ at least for the tolling argument,” the decision added. “Many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous.”
While he was out of office following his 2020 election loss, Trump filed the sprawling racketeering complaint over the Russia investigation that dogged his first term, but the appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that he had committed sanctionable conduct with Habba, who is now interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
“Trump leaves all these frivolous claims behind, making a total of 11 of his 16 claims he does not appeal,” the court ruled. “Trump and Habba give us no reason to reverse the district court’s ruling that these claims were frivolous.”
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