The appeals court is expected to issue its decision in the coming weeks or months, and if Donald Trump loses, he can seek a rehearing by the full court or ask the Supreme Court to take up the case.
The appeals court is expected to issue its decision in the coming weeks or months, and if Donald Trump loses, he can seek a rehearing by the full court or ask the Supreme Court to take up the case.
A RICO lawsuit
A federal appeals court is now reviewing Donald Trump’s attempt to revive a sweeping RICO lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, and several others of driving what Trump calls the «Russia hoax» against his 2016 presidential campaign.
The 2016 campaign
In 2022, Donald Trump brought a lawsuit claiming that Hillary Rodham Clinton, James Comey, and others conspired to invent allegations of collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign, which he argued harmed his reputation and business dealings.
Poorly structured
In 2023, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton, dismissed Trump’s lawsuit, calling the 193-page filing a «shotgun pleading» that was confusing and poorly structured.
No reasonable lawyer
Middlebrooks found that the complaint failed to identify any coordinated enterprise, did not allege valid criminal acts, did not show concrete financial damages, and was filed outside the applicable statute of limitations. Concluding that the suit served a political rather than legal purpose, Middlebrooks wrote: «This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it»
The three-judge panel
At the appeals stage, the three-judge panel expressed skepticism as they weighed whether the case, dismissed in 2023, should be revived in federal court and whether nearly $1 million in sanctions against Trump and his former attorney Alina Habba stemming from that lawsuit should be allowed to stand.
A classic shotgun complaint
Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr., one of the three judges on the Eleventh Circuit panel hearing Trump’s appeal, underscored early in the session that he viewed Trump’s sprawling 108-page complaint — expanded to 193 pages in a later version — as a «classic shotgun complaint» that improperly lumped together too many defendants and claims, saying: «I can read this complaint. It seems a classic shotgun complaint. It incorporates, by reference, hundreds of paragraphs into succeeding counts.»
The coming weeks or months
The appeals court is expected to issue its decision in the coming weeks or months, and if Donald Trump loses, he can seek a rehearing by the full court or ask the Supreme Court to take up the case.
A civil judgment
In another of his legal cases, Donald Trump recently filed a request with the Supreme Court seeking to dismiss a civil judgment against him in the E. Jean Carroll case, after a New York jury in May 2023 found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded 5 million dollars in damages, followed by a second jury in January 2024 that ordered him to pay an additional 83.3 million dollars for further defamatory statements.