President Donald Trump promised to “Lock Her Up” when running against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election – and while she has avoided prison in the past decade, Hillary’s legal problems aren’t simply going away.
Trump’s attorneys appeared before a federal appeals court in Birmingham, Alabama on Tuesday seeking to revive a dismissed racketeering lawsuit that accused Hillary and the Democratic National Committee of conspiring to fabricate evidence that linked his 2016 campaign to Russia.
The hearing at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came more than three years after U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks dismissed the case and imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions against Trump and his former attorney Alina Habba for filing what the judge called a “frivolous” lawsuit.
Trump filed the 108-page lawsuit in March 2022, alleging that Clinton, the DNC and more than two dozen defendants violated federal racketeering law by joining a conspiracy to spread “a false narrative of collusion between Trump and Russia.”
“The president is the victim in this case of a continuous pattern of misconduct,” Trump attorney Richard Klugh said Tuesday.
The lawsuit alleged that Clinton and political operatives conspired to taint Trump’s 2016 campaign with the false claims that he was “colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.” Klugh argued that these “Russiagate” conspiracy theories damaged Trump’s brand and forced him to spend millions of dollars defending himself against multiple investigations.
Middlebrooks, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, dismissed the case in September 2022, and ruled that Trump had missed the two-year statute of limitations and failed to show legal or financial harm. The judge dismissed the case as a political “manifesto” rather than a proper legal claim.
Trump’s lawyers argued Tuesday that the statute of limitations should have been paused because Trump was president until January 2021 and couldn’t fully pursue the case. They also said facts and information were concealed until as late as 2023, when they were revealed in the Durham Report.
“Here, the hiding of the motivation, the structure, the payment, the participation and how the participation was organized was crucial to initiating the phony Russia collusion investigation,” Klugh said. “It was, in our view, absolutely fundamental.”
Klugh claimed “over a million dollars” was exchanged between defendants.
“In olden times, the lesson was to follow the money. That was considered the key to unraveling and to establishing the connection or the conspiracy,” he said. “This enterprise has a criminal component to it. It links back to the fundamental purpose of the crimes here, which was to upset the democratic process.”
Trump’s appeal also seeks to void the nearly $1 million in penalties levied against him and Habba.
The lawsuit named Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, former FBI Director James Comey, former White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and more than two dozen others as defendants. Trump originally sought more than $70 million in damages.
Trump filed the lawsuit while special counsel John Durham’s criminal investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe was ongoing. Durham’s investigation resulted in three indictments but little criminal evidence from the conspiracy.
If Trump loses, he can seek a rehearing by the full court or appeal to the Supreme Court.