Trump Files Appeal Against Million-Dollar Sanctions Order Due To… Ummm, He’ll Tell You Later
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On Friday, Donald Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba, asked a Florida federal judge to stay the $938,000 fines imposed on them last month.
They also filed a notice of appeal of the fee-shifting ruling today, accusing them of proceeding with a case that “no reasonable lawyer would have filed.”
This is their third appeal to the Eleventh Circuit since the judge ordered them to post a million-dollar supersedeas bail after rejecting their insane stringboard conspiracy complaint claiming a dastardly RICO perpetrated by Hillary Clinton, the FBI, and half of DC.
Although, as Judge Middlebrooks pointed out, part of Team Trump’s litigation “playbook” includes massively fundraising off performative lawsuits and then using PAC money to pay lawyers — so surely it’s all just for show.
In September, the court dismissed the case in a furious order, accusing the former president of “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.” He ominously concluded by reserving “jurisdiction to adjudicate issues pertaining to sanctions.”
The plaintiffs filed an appeal in October, but in the meantime, one of the hundreds of claimants sought and was granted $66,000 in Rule 11 fines.
The non-governmental plaintiffs then tried to have their fees reimbursed on the grounds that Trump and his lawyers had forced them to produce a second round of motions to dismiss an updated lawsuit that was 85 pages long and no less stupid.
Trump and Habba are represented in the Eleventh Circuit by Jesse Binnall, a Kraken alum who has made a name for himself. After moving to consolidate the appeals of the dismissal and Rule 11 fines, they were able to get the briefing delayed until February 22.
They’ll likely do it again now, in a try to combine the appeal of the second sanction with the earlier case and avoid laying any cards on the table for another several weeks.
So we’ll have to wait and see how the court went wrong in concluding that Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly have conspired with her own lawyer to obtain publicly available DNS lookup data to provide to the FBI in September of 2016 in order to retroactively start the Russia investigation the previous July.
Anyone claiming that Trump has learned his lesson and will no longer file civil suits after Judge Middlebrooks slapped him across the knuckles with his gavel should be reminded that the initial vexatious litigant still has plenty of court lawsuits in the works.
Yes, Trump dismissed the ridiculous case brought in Florida state court against New York Attorney General Letitia James and sent it to the federal docket, where it was swiftly assigned to Judge Middlebrooks.
He also withdrew his appeal in the Second Circuit of the dismissal of a related action against the NYAG in the Northern District of New York. But he’s still suing the Pulitzer Prize board in Okeechobee County, CNN in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Twitter, YouTube, and Meta on the grounds that they canceled his account because Rep.
Adam Schiff told them to, and threatened to sue advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan for who knows how much.
Trump will keep filing these garbage cases until the earth collides with the sun. After that, he’ll spend whatever time remains until the universe’s heat death appealing his losses.
