Trump suit against Clinton part of longtime legal strategy
When a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic panned Donald Trump’s plans for a new Manhattan skyscraper, Trump responded by suing. When the tenants of a building he was trying to clear sued to halt their evictions, Trump slapped back by filing suit against the law firm representing the tenants. And when an author said the former president was worth far less than he’d claimed, Trump again took legal action.
So when Trump last week filed a sprawling suit accusing his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party of conspiring to sink his winning presidential campaign by alleging ties to Russia — renewing one of his longest-standing perceived affronts — it wasn’t a surprise.
Trump has spent decades repurposing political and personal grievances into causes of legal action.
Throughout his business and political career, he has used the courts as a venue to air his complaints and as a tool to intimidate adversaries, sully their reputations and try to garner media attention.
“It’s part of his pattern of using the law to punish his enemies, as a weapon, as something it was never intended to be,” said James D. Zirin, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the author of the book “Plaintiff in Chief,” which details Trump’s legal history. “For him, litigation was a way of life.”
Trump’s latest lawsuit revisits a familiar grievance: that Democrats in 2016 concocted fictitious claims that his campaign was colluding with Russia and that the FBI as a result pursued an “unfounded” investigation.
The 108-page suit, as much a political screed as a legal document, names as defendants longstanding targets of his ire from both the political realm — Clinton and her aides — and the law enforcement community, including former
FBI Director James Comey and Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI officials who exchanged critical text messages about Trump during the 2016 campaign.
It also piggybacks off the work of special counsel John Durham, listing as defendants the three people — a cybersecurity attorney, an ex-FBI lawyer and a Russia analyst — who have been charged in that criminal probe.
Trump, in the suit, paints himself as the victim of a vast, racketeering conspiracy in which FBI officials who led the investigation knew that it was “based on a false and contrived premise.”
“Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” his lawyers wrote, describing the alleged scheme as “so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.”
It’s well-established through a Justice Department inspector general investigation that the FBI made errors and missteps during the Russia probe that Trump could look to seize on if his lawsuit advances. But Russia did meddle in the 2016 election.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in January 2017 that Russia mounted a far-ranging influence campaign aimed at helping Trump beat Clinton. And the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, after three years of investigation, affirmed those conclusions, saying intelligence officials had specific information that Russia preferred Trump and that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “approved and directed aspects” of the Kremlin’s influence campaign. It also found clear ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia, concluding that Trump’s campaign chairman had had regular contact with a Russian intelligence officer and that other Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid.