Court Dumps Trump Lawsuit Claiming Hillary Clinton Rigged The 2016 Election He Actually Won
Sooooooo… this was something that happened.
Trump, the commander of a fine legal team that has included, over the years, plenty of people facing indictments, sanctions, and lawsuits of their own, sued the Clinton campaign for trying to throw an election he ended up winning.
Perhaps Trump was as surprised by his victory as millions of Americans were. But millions of Americans simply went on with their lives, hoped for the best, started dying in droves, and then took him for a ride to the farm golf course in the 2020 election. An attempted insurrection followed and somehow millions of Americans still believe the best thing for the country is Grover Cleveland 2.0. And I mean that pretty much literally.
Cleveland, like a growing number of Northerners and nearly all white Southerners, saw Reconstruction as a failed experiment, and was reluctant to use federal power to enforce the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed voting rights to African Americans…
Although Cleveland had condemned the “outrages” against Chinese immigrants, he believed that Chinese immigrants were unwilling to assimilate into white society. Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard negotiated an extension to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Cleveland lobbied the Congress to pass the Scott Act, written by Congressman William Lawrence Scott, which prevented the return of Chinese immigrants who left the United States. The Scott Act easily passed both houses of Congress, and Cleveland signed it into law on October 1, 1888.
The sorest winner in presidential history still thinks a federal court should force Hillary Clinton to pay him actual money for allegedly conspiring against him to… allow him to ascend to the Oval Office following the Electoral College vote.
Long story short, Trump sued Hillary Clinton over an election he won. His allegations were, well, seemingly incomprehensible. Trump’s lawyers are being paid per word or per ream of paper. But, either way, the court is mostly unable to figure out if Trump’s complaining contains any actionable complaints. From the decision [PDF]:
Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way.
This is followed up by a judicial sigh of resignation.
Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here.
So shall I. Trump alleged Clinton “colluded with a hostile foreign entity” to elicit “spurious opposition research” (referring to the Christopher Steele dossier) and another report claiming to tie Trump hotels to Russian financiers via DNS records (a report that was immediately debunked by everyone with an understanding of how internet traffic works).
According to Trump and his lawyers, this is irrefutable evidence the Clinton campaign conspired to prevent him from winning an election he won. The court is far less certain this is evidence of anything. When it comes to legal claims, quality is preferable to quantity — something Trump’s lawyers clearly don’t understand.
Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint is 193 pages in length, with 819 numbered paragraphs. It contains 14 counts, names 31 defendants, 10 “John Does” described as fictitious and unknown persons, and 10 “ABC Corporations” identified as fictitious and unknown entities. Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint is neither short nor plain, and it certainly does not establish that Plaintiff is entitled to any relief.
Brevity isn’t always wit, but in this case, brevity would be preferable to sprawling narratives with no cognizable claims. Longer is not better. An amending a complaint to make it longer, but no better, doesn’t do much else but waste the court’s time. The length of the complaints is only part of the problem. The real problems are the complete lack of anything actionable.
More troubling, the claims presented in the Amended Complaint are not warranted under existing law. In fact, they are foreclosed by existing precedent, including decisions of the Supreme Court.
Tossing in a belated, unsupported wire fraud claim in an attempt to salvage doomed RICO claims only made things worse for Trump. (Emphasis in the original.)
Not only does Plaintiff lack standing to complain about an alleged scheme to defraud the news media, but his lawyers ignore the Supreme Court’s holdings that the federal wire fraud statute prohibits only deceptive schemes to deprive the victim of money or property. It is necessary to show not only that a defendant engaged in deception, but that an object of the fraud was property.
An election is not “property.” While it might be possible to insinuate that depriving Trump of the presidency deprived him of money, the dozens of pages and hundreds of paragraphs failed to show how this alleged conspiracy deprived Trump of anything. He still won the election. And, on top of that, it did not deprive Trump of money or property. He retained his (frequently overstated) wealth. And he did not lose any of his property. Instead, he gained a brand new, rent-free address located in the one of the most upscale neighborhoods of the nation’s capital.
It’s just one benchslap after another for Trump and his legal reps.
Many of the Amended Complaint’s characterizations of events are implausible because they lack any specific allegations which might provide factual support for the conclusions reached.
Back to criticizing the convolutions and length of the complaints:
Plaintiff has annotated the Amended Complaint with 293 footnotes containing references to various public reports and findings. He is not required to annotate his Complaint; in fact, it is inconsistent with Rule 8’s requirement of a short and plain statement of the claim. But if a party chooses to include such references, it is expected that they be presented in good faith and with evidentiary support. Unfortunately, that is not the case here.
Citing a DOJ Inspector General’s report on alleged election interference? Possibly good. Misstating its conclusions? Definitely bad.
Plaintiff and his lawyers are of course free to reject the conclusion of the Inspector General. But they cannot misrepresent it in a pleading.
Never a subheading anyone filing a complaint wants to see in a court’s response to a motion to dismiss.
Shotgun Pleading
Doubling down on bad pleadings is even worse.
To say that Plaintiff’s 193-page, 819-paragraph Amended Complaint is excessive in length would be putting things mildly. And to make matters worse, the Amended Complaint commits the “mortal sin” of incorporating by reference into every count all the general allegations and all the allegations of the preceding counts.
This subheading? Also seriously bad news for unserious lawyers filing unserious complaints on behalf of an extremely unserious person.
Fictitious Defendants
Much more discussion follows, mainly because the sprawling complaints have forced the court to address a ton of facially invalid arguments. Among those is the statute of limitations for RICO claims, which, at four years, gave the Trump people until October 2021, at the latest, to file. They chose not to do so until 2022. His lawyers claimed Trump should have rolling tolling, applicable until the end of his presidency in January 2021.
The court says this simply isn’t the case. The president was or should have been aware of the incidents and reporting underlying this federal complaint since October 2017. That he chose to sue several months after the statute of limitations had expired is on him. The court can’t (and won’t) save him.
And so it continues for another 25 pages. There is nothing in here Trump can continue to pursue. It’s a shutout. The entire thing (both the original and amended complaints) are dismissed with prejudice as far as the non-federal defendants are concerned. The lawsuit is still (barely) alive (dismissed without prejudice) in terms of federal defendants. But, given Trump’s inability to amend a complaint cohesively, concisely, or comprehensibly, it will only be a matter of time before those claims are dismissed definitively by this same court.
Trump won. Maybe he should just enjoy the win, rather than claim people conspired against him to keep him out of an office he ultimately held for four deeply regrettable years.