Justice v. Donald Trump
The former president and his cadre of lawyers are finally getting pushback from the legal system they’ve abused for his political ends. It’s a heartening sign.
After years of being manipulated by Donald Trump, the justice system may have finally had it with the litigious expresident and businessman. And it seems Mr. Trump, or at least his lawyers, are getting the message.
It’s about time. Everyone deserves their day in court, as the saying goes. But it’s one thing for Mr. Trump to make a mockery of the American political system — mocking politics and politicians has, after all, been a longstanding tradition in American humor, literature, commentary, and, heck, even politics itself. It’s quite another thing for him to so openly turn the justice system into a joke.
Mr. Trump, one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, and her law firm were slapped with more than $937,000 in sanctions Jan. 19 by Florida-based U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrook, and they were excoriated in a scathing ruling that said the clearly frivolous case should never have been brought. Mr. Trump filed the lawsuit last March against nearly three dozen political targets, including his 2016 presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, former F.B.I. director James Comey, and the Democratic National Committee, accusing them of a vast conspiracy against him.
Judge Middlebrook said it was a political manifesto with no “cognizable legal claim.” He lambasted Mr. Trump for a history of abusing the courts, attacking as partisans judges who don’t do his bidding, undermining public confidence in the justice system, and tying up public resources.
It’s not the first time the justice system has signaled that it has lost patience with Mr. Trump’s legal nonsense. Several lawyers who were involved in lawsuits over his bogus claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him have either had their law licenses suspended in some states or face investigations or formal proceedings that could lead to such sanctions. The list includes Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and John Eastman, some of those involved in either the more than 60 failed lawsuits filed in furtherance of Mr. Trump’s big lie, or in the legal strategizing to overturn the election.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that since Judge Middlebrook’s ruling, Mr. Trump and his lawyers have withdrawn two lawsuits he filed against New York Attorney General Letitia James in response to her civil case against him and his Trump Organization over what she contends is “staggering fraud” in his business dealings. The New York Times reported that even some of Mr. Trump’s legal advisers had warned that at least one of the suits was frivolous, and that filing it could bring sanctions.
It’s noteworthy that these developments come as some of the nation’s most popular social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — have allowed Mr. Trump back after they prudently banished him for fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol with his fraudulent election claims. To give this insurrectionist back soapboxes from which he incessantly attacked this nation’s institutions is a grave mistake.
But at least some judges are willing to defend the institution they represent. If financial penalties and the threat of disbarment make Mr. Trump and the diminishing pool of lawyers willing to work for him think twice about misusing the legal system to harass whoever crosses him, then America, you might say, has finally had its own day in court.