Donald Trump fined nearly $1 million for attempting the courts as a political weapon.

The best news of the past week may have been the decision by a federal district court judge to fine Donald Trump and his attorneys nearly $1 million for their filing of frivolous actions against Hillary Clinton and others.  In Trump v. Clinton, the former president alleged, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the defendants had orchestrated “a malicious conspiracy” to spread false information that the Trump campaign campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/20/donald-trump-fine-court-clinton/  

The decision may be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157.302.0.pdf

 

These sanctions are being imposed under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_11  In my decades at the Department of Justice, there was an instance when I thought that a complaint filed against the United States by a manufacturer of asbestos products was so frivolous that we should file for Rule 11 sanctions against the company and their attorneys for bringing it.  My request to seek Rule 11 sanctions was turned down because the general approach of DOJ is that such drastic sanctions should only be imposed in the most egregious of situations, since courts would be reluctant to create a slippery slope for their imposition.  In my case, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the legal theories that led me to believe the suits were frivolous.  So my superiors were probably correct.  Five years later, the Supreme Court issued a decision against Agent Orange manufacturers in Hercules v. United States, 516 U.S. 417 (1996) on the same legal argument.  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/516/417/  Fortunately, and appropriately, no asbestos product manufacturer ever brought such a suit again. 

 

In Trump v. Clinton, on the other hand, there were no disputed legal issues not definitively and  long-settled by the Supreme Court, and the factual underpinnings for the complaint were plainly false.  So the failure to impose Rule 11 sanctions would have been an effective repeal of the Rule.  A Rule that is never enforced, even when there is no factual or legal basis for the suit, is no rule at all. 

 

Trump’s insistence on proceeding with the lawsuit was another attempt to destroy the Rule of Law in the United States, using the judicial system to intimidate his political opponents into silence.  The dangers posed by January 6 are still out there.  Thankfully, the district court here pushed back.