Hillary Clinton Faces Supreme Court Showdown as Trump Seeks To Revive $72 Million Conspiracy Lawsuit

Hillary Clinton is on deadline to convince the Supreme Court to reject President Trump’s $72 million lawsuit against her — or she could face a reckoning with the president before the Nine.Mr. Trump has petitioned the high court for a writ of certiorari, asking it to take up a lawsuit that was previously dismissed by Judge Donald Middlebrooks and then by the 11th United States Circuit Court of Appeals. The justices have ordered Mrs. Clinton to explain why the civil suit should not be revived by November 27. Mr. Trump first petitioned for certiorari on October 9. Mrs. Clinton, however, waived her right to respond to the petition. Such a tactic is often adopted by parties who reckon that the court is set to reject a case. At least one justice, though, wanted to hear more before the court disposed of the petition. It is not known which justice requested the response. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, however, was the justice who handled Mr. Trump’s earlier applications for extensions of time to file his petition, as the case originated in the 11th Circuit.While the order requiring Mrs. Clinton to respond suggests that the court is not ready to dismiss the petition summarily, no signals indicate that four justices — the number required to grant certiorari — favor hearing the case.Mr. Trump filed his suit in Florida in 2022, accusing Mrs. Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, and others of “racketeering” and a “conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood” by generating a “false narrative” that his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia. Mrs. Clinton called the suit “nonsense.”Mr. Trump characterized the alleged conspiracy as an unthinkable plot, but lawyers for the former secretary of state derided the lawsuit as a “fundraising tool, a press release, or a list of political grievances.” Judge Middlebrooks agreed, ordering Mr. Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba, to pay $1 million in sanctions for advancing “knowingly false” factual allegations. The judge described the lawsuit as a “two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him.”The sanctions were upheld by the 11th Circuit, an appellate tribunal with a discernibly conservative bent. That court agreed that “many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous.” Mr. Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court asserts that taking the case is “necessary to protect the presidency, and to prevent judicial disagreement from becoming a license to punish its advocates.”The president’s legal team reckons that such an argument could find a receptive audience before the Roberts Court, which has been protective of presidential prerogatives.The high court’s landmark ruling in Trump v. United States in 2024 decreed that sitting presidents enjoy presumptive immunity from prosecution for official acts, but not for unofficial ones. Trump, though, concerned criminal prosecution, not a civil suit such as Donald J. Trump v. Hillary R. Clinton. Mr. Trump’s appeal argues that there is “a deeply troubling trend of federal courts using sanctions and disciplinary threats to punish the president and his lawyers for legitimate legal positions.”Mr. Trump’s case is wending its way through the courts as Mrs. Clinton remains a prominent Democratic figure. Last month, she declared that “we should seriously look at expanding the court while the Democrats are in power. You know, it used to be that you’d have one justice for each circuit. We now have 13 circuits; we should have 13 justices.” President Biden considered endorsing such a proposal but ultimately demurred.In the wake of Democrats’ triumph in the midterm elections, Mrs. Clinton declared on her new podcast, co-hosted by Kara Swisher, that “we’re going to have to really figure out how to pass legislation. And that’s, I think, you know, what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is going to be focused on. We have to put some points on the board. We can’t be engaged in some kind of intramural, you know, rivalry.”

Hillary Clinton Faces Supreme Court Showdown as Trump Seeks To Revive $72 Million Conspiracy Lawsuit

Hillary Clinton Faces Supreme Court Showdown as Trump Seeks To Revive $72 Million Conspiracy Lawsuit

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