Judge Tosses Trump's Lawsuit Against Hillary Clinton Former President Donald Trump. (AP)
By Charlie McCarthy | Friday, 09 September 2022 11:01 AM EDT
A federal judge has thrown out former President Donald Trump's lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and others over the since discredited Russian collusion allegations.
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Donald Middlebrooks said Trump was "seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum."
Trumps lawyers plan to appeal Middlebrooks ruling, which was dated Thursday.
"We vehemently disagree with the opinion issued by the Court today," Trump's lawyer, Alina Habba, said in a statement to Newsmax. "Not only is it rife with erroneous applications of the law, it disregards the numerous independent governmental investigations which substantiate our claim that the defendants conspired to falsely implicate our client and undermine the 2016 Presidential election. We will immediately move to appeal this decision."
Trump in late-March sued Clinton, the Democrat nominee in the 2016 presidential election, and several other Democrats, alleging that they tried to rig that election by tying his campaign to Russia.
The suit was amended in June to include new details from Special Counsel John Durham's failed prosecution of Democrat lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was accused of lying to the FBI while providing a Trump-Russia tip just before the 2016 election, Bloomberg reported.
Middlebrooks said Trump exceeded the legal statute of limitations and that "many of the statements that Plaintiff characterizes as injurious falsehoods qualify as speech plainly protected by the First Amendment."
"At its core, the problem with Plaintiffs Amended Complaint is that Plaintiff is not attempting to seek redress for any legal harm," Middlebrooks wrote, Axios reported.
Middlebrooks, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, in April denied a request from Trump to recuse himself in the lawsuit.
"Every federal judge is appointed by a president who is affiliated with a major political party, and, therefore, every federal judge could theoretically be viewed as beholden, to some extent or another," Middlebrooks wrote.
"As judges, we must all transcend politics."
Reuters contributed to this story.