Former U.S. President Donald Trump spoke during a campaign rally at Legacy Sports USA on October 9, 2022 in Mesa, Arizona. Hillary Clinton attended an event on September 10, 2022 in Toronto, Ontario.
Though Georgia racketeering (RICO) criminal defendant Donald Trump’s civil RICO lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and several of her Democratic allies was thrown out nearly one year ago, the former president is still trying to disqualify the judge appointed by then-President Bill Clinton. On Monday night, former Secretary of State Clinton, through her lawyers, called the disqualification effort “wholly meritless.”
The opposition to Trump’s motion to disqualify was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on behalf of Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, Robby Mook, Jake Sullivan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Michael Sussmann, Marc Elias, Igor Danchenko, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, and more.
The Clinton motion in opposition called the second Trump motion to disqualify “as meritless as the first.”
Chalking up Trump’s lawsuit as “frivolous several times over,” the defendants’ lawyers said that U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks’ “stern” or “harsh language” when dismissing a “meritless” case cannot lead to recusal. Put another way, the motion said Trump cannot demand the removal of a judge simply because he lost and the judge bluntly spelled out just how far away the complaint was from success.
“Here, the snippets of language Movants identify from the Court’s orders in no way demonstrate that the Court ‘took on the role of an advocate for the Defendants,”” the Clinton motion said. “Instead, they show that the Court agreed with Defendants’ well-founded legal positions after considering the parties’ extensive briefing on the issues. This language explained the Court’s legal conclusion that Plaintiff’s claims were not merely meritless, but frivolous several times over.”
“That Defendants prevailed on these points, and Plaintiff did not, does not indicate any bias on the part of the Court. Indeed, Plaintiff has not even appealed the Court’s dismissal of thirteen of the sixteen claims in the Amended Complaint,” the filing continued. “Moreover, many of the statements Movants highlight regarding the political nature of the case were made in the course of this Court’s findings of bad faith and improper purpose.
Defendant Charles Dolan sepearately filed a motion that said the renewed disqualification effort amounted to Trump “improperly judge-shopping” for a jurist who would accept “outlandish” pleadings:
Plaintiff takes the position that the Court, in ruling against Plaintiff unequivocally and thoroughly, has confirmed Plaintiff’s case for bias and recusal. Under this reasoning, any unequivocal, harsh ruling against Plaintiff could be raised as grounds for recusal.
The more logical and rational conclusion from the Court’s prior decision, especially given the obvious deficiencies cited by the Court, is that Plaintiff and his counsel brought a defective case, filed creative but deficient (and in some cases false and outlandish) pleadings, and pursued a political vendetta in a legal proceeding. Under these circumstances, recusal is especially inappropriate.
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Rejecting the case law cited by Trump as “nothing even remotely resembling” Middlebrooks’ conduct, the Clinton motion concluded that the “facts here bear no resemblance to the rare cases in which courts have deemed recusal warranted.”
Trump first attempted to boot Judge Middlebrooks from the civil RICO case in April 2022 on grounds that Middlebrooks was appointed by Bill Clinton, but that effort failed and, by September 2022, so did the lawsuit.
Thereafter, Trump lawyers moved to stave off sanctions as the former president appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
The second attempt to disqualify the judge was filed two weeks ago, airing concerns of “politically charged language” and complaining that Middlebrooks “entered orders accepting Defendants’ narration of the ‘facts’ as true, without taking evidence or even holding a hearing, while entirely discounting President Trump’s allegations and punishing President Trump and his former counsel for exercising their First Amendment rights and pursuing viable legal remedies here and elsewhere.”
As Law&Crime has noted multiple times over, the judge was appointed by Bill Clinton, but Middlebrooks said he’s never actually met the Clintons and that he was “confirmed by the Senate by unanimous consent in a voice vote.”
“I have never met or spoken with Bill or Hillary Clinton. Other than my appointment by Bill Clinton, I do not now have nor have I ever had any relationship with the Clintons,” Middlebrooks wrote the first time he rejected the motion to disqualify, citing United States v. Cerceda, an 11th Circuit case that says, “Recusal cannot be based on unsupported, irrational or highly tenuous speculation.”
“Every federal judge is appointed by a president who is affiliated with a major political party, and therefore every federal judge could theoretically be viewed as beholden, to some extent or another,” Middlebrooks continued. “As judges, we must all transcend politics.”
The Trump lawsuit alleged that Clinton and other named defendants, “blinded by political ambition, orchestrated a malicious conspiracy to disseminate patently false and injurious information about Donald J. Trump and his campaign, all in the hopes of destroying his life, his political career and rigging the 2016 Presidential Election in favor of Hillary Clinton.”
Trump currently faces criminal charges that he headed a racketeering enterprise and conspired not only to lie about the results of the 2020 election, which he lost, but also to take steps to overturn the results in violation of Georgia law.
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