Trump Files Racketeering Suit Against Clinton, Comey, And Dozens Of Others For The Crime Of Investigating Donald Trump
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. Citing years of profound personal anguish, former President Donald J. Trump filed a sprawling federal racketeering lawsuit Thursday against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, former FBI Director James Comey, and dozens of other Americans, accusing them of the organized criminal enterprise of having once suspected him of an organized criminal enterprise.
The suit, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a statute originally written to dismantle the Mafia, to address what the complaint described as a coordinated conspiracy to "weave a false narrative" that Trump's 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia. Legal observers noted that the alleged victim of this narrative had gone on to win that election and serve a full four-year term as president, a detail the complaint addressed primarily by not addressing it.
"The defendants maliciously conspired to discredit, defame, and destroy a private citizen who had committed the singular offense of running for and winning the highest office in the land," read the filing, which named Clinton, the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Comey, the research firm Fusion GPS, and a supporting cast of more than two dozen additional defendants, several of whom reportedly learned they were defendants from the news. The complaint sought tens of millions of dollars in damages for the reputational harm of being investigated, a process that had ultimately concluded without charging Trump with the underlying conspiracy.
"This is about accountability," said one source within the former president's legal orbit, describing a lawsuit that courts would soon cite as a textbook illustration of why accountability mechanisms exist in the first place. According to people familiar with the strategy, the complaint doubled as fundraising material, was forwarded to small-dollar donors within hours of filing, and performed its most important function (generating donations and grievance) long before any judge could perform the secondary function of reading it.
That reading arrived on September 8, 2022, when U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks dismissed the case in full, concluding that it "should never have been brought" and characterizing the document less as a legal complaint than as a "political manifesto" assembled to harass rather than to state a claim. The following January, the judge ordered Trump and his attorney Alina Habba to pay nearly $938,000 in sanctions for filing it, thereby converting a lawsuit that alleged a corrupt abuse of process into a formally documented abuse of process.
At press time, Trump had announced plans to appeal the ruling that he had abused the court system, on the grounds that being told he had abused the court system constituted a fresh and actionable abuse of the court system.