presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton attend campaign rallies in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, October 10, 2016 and Manchester, Recent Hampshire U.S., October 24, 2016 in a mixture of file photos.
Mike Segar | Carlos Barria | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump and one in every of his lawyers said Monday they are appealing nearly $1 million in sanctions imposed on them for what a federal judge called their “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and greater than two dozen other defendants.
The court filing concerning the appeal got here days after a lawyer for Trump and his attorney Alina Habba told the judge within the case they were willing to place up a bond of $1,031,788 to cover the prices of the sanctions while the federal Court of Appeals for the eleventh Circuit considered the matter.
The appeal will join one other one at that court of appeals, which seeks each to reverse the dismissal of Trump’s lawsuit and to overturn an earlier, $50,000 sanctions order imposed against only against Trump’s lawyers.
“The Florida federal lawsuit filed on behalf of President Trump was factually correct and legally sound,” said Jesse Binnall, a lawyer for Trump and Habba, who’s handling the appeal.
“We look ahead to making our case to the Eleventh Circuit as every one in every of the selections by the district court must be decisively reversed,” Binnall said.
Trump’s suit, which sought $70 million in damages, had accused Clinton, former FBI officials, the Democratic National Committee and others of conspiring to create a “false narrative” that Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign against Clinton were colluding with Russia to attempt to win the election that yr.
Judge John Middlebrooks in September dismissed the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and barred Trump from refiling the criticism. Trump then appealed that dismissal.
Middlebrooks later imposed $50,000 in sanctions on Habba and other lawyers on the request of one in every of the defendants, former DNC chairman Charles Dolan. Habba is appealing that order.
On Jan. 19, Middlebrooks slapped greater than $937,000 in sanctions on Trump and Habba for suing the opposite defendants.
“We’re confronted with a lawsuit that ought to never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, each factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote in his sanctions order.
Middlebrooks in that order called Trump “a mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process,” and a “prolific and complicated litigant who’s repeatedly using the courts to hunt revenge on political adversaries.”
A day after that order, Trump voluntarily dropped one other lawsuit he had pending before the identical judge against Recent York Attorney General Letitia James. That suit was related to James’ pending $250 million fraud lawsuit against Trump and his company in Manhattan state court.