Alina Habba speaks at Turning Point USA event (@Acyn/X screengrab)
One of the more public-facing members of Donald Trump’s legal team told a Turning Point USA crowd on Sunday that no one knows she and the former president were sanctioned to the tune of $1 million for bringing a racketeering (RICO) lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and numerous others, a case which went nowhere.
While Alina Habba’s remarks inspired at least one person in the AmericaFest 2023 audience to loudly exclaim “What?!”, the attorney’s overarching assertion that the media didn’t report about the RICO case dismissal and resulting sanctions is demonstrably untrue. At the same time, Habba left her attorney peers wondering why she was calling more attention to something that would make other lawyers blush — namely, bringing a lawsuit that was so legally deficient that she and her client were both ordered to pay just under a million dollars for the trouble they caused.
Lawyer is sanctioned by a federal judge for bringing a frivolous case and blames the media for . . . not giving the sanction ruling enough attention. (P.S. it got a lot of attention: https://t.co/4XwPeFbSh2.) https://t.co/Cy1qDPhTBL
— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) December 18, 2023
This is very strange. Apparently she wants publicity about how unethical a lawyer she is. It is incredibly hard to be sanctioned under Rule 11. It actually takes work!#egomaniac #FullOfOneSelf #MAGA (Make America Get Attorneys) https://t.co/7fodEDEM2D
— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) December 18, 2023
What Alina Habba said
Habba began by lamenting that the failed RICO case was assigned to a “Clinton-appointed judge,” insinuating that was the only fact the crowd needed to know as to why the case was dismissed.
“And what do you think happened?” Habba asked. “Nobody’s heard of the case, right? That’s because it’s gone. I never met the judge, I never walked into the courtroom. There were probably 50 lawyers representing all of the radical left, Clinton’s lawyers, Mook’s lawyers. The list goes on and on and on.”
“One month, it got dismissed and me and President Trump got sanctioned a million dollars for going against Crooked Hillary,” Habba said.
Habba: It got dismissed and me and President Trump got sanctioned a million dollars for going against crooked Hillary! You didn’t know that did you? Fake news. They won’t report it. pic.twitter.com/h4srzUg3X2
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 17, 2023
That’s when an audience member yelled, “What?!”
“You didn’t know that did you?” Habba asked. “Fake news, folks. Fake news. They won’t report it. But guess what, we paid that million and we’re gonna keep on fighting,” Habba said, to cheers.
What the judge said about the Clintons and Habba’s case
In March 2022, while special counsel John Durham’s criminal investigation of the Russia investigation was ongoing, Trump filed a RICO lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, “Steele Dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, former FBI Director James Comey, and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, to name just a few, accusing them of orchestrating “an unthinkable plot” to tar the 2016 Trump Campaign and cloud the Trump presidency by conjuring up “a sinister link between Donald J. Trump and Russia.”
The sheer number of initial defendants would explain why there “were probably 50 lawyers representing” all of them.
The next month, Trump’s attorneys moved for the first time to disqualify U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks from the case, arguing that then-President Bill Clinton’s appointment of Middlebrooks to a lifetime federal judgeship in the 1990s was in itself a reason the judge “should recuse himself from acting in any capacity in this subject litigation” — even though the motion admitted Trump’s team was “unaware of the exact extent of the relationship between Judge Middlebrooks and the Defendant, Hillary Clinton, herself, who acted as First Lady of the United States, during the time of the Judge’s nomination to Federal Court Judge” and “unaware if the Judge has current relationship with either the Defendant, Hillary Clinton, or her husband, and how far back the relationship has existed.”
Just two days later, Middlebrooks denied the motion to disqualify, writing that he has “never met or spoken with” the Clintons.
“To warrant recusal, something more must be involved than solely my appointment to the bench twenty-five years ago by the spouse of a litigant now before me. And the conclusory assertions in Plaintiff’s Motion do not supply any conceivable, additional grounds. I have never met or spoken with Bill or Hillary Clinton,” Middlebrooks said. “Other than my appointment by Bill Clinton, I do not now have nor have I ever had any relationship with the Clintons.”
Then, in September 2022, Middlebrooks threw out the revamped version of the case (which included basic mistakes). The judge did not give the Trump team’s filings high marks.
“What the Amended Complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances,” Middlebrooks wrote, agreeing with the defendants’ characterizations of the lawsuit as more a “fundraising tool” or “a press release” than anything resembling a legal action with merit.
Defense motions for sanctions followed and, in January 2023, the judge obliged by ordering up $937,989.39 in sanctions against Trump and Habba for their roles in the “shotgun pleadings.”
“Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks said, calling the Trump RICO complaint a “hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.”
“This is a deliberate attempt to harass; to tell a story without regard to facts,” the judge added later. “In order to understand the scope of this abuse, multiply the above discussion by thirty-one defendants and their lawyers, forced to try to analyze and defend against the sprawling Complaints. I sifted through the thread of allegations against each defendant only to find they added up to no cognizable claim. And the pleadings were drafted in a way to disguise that fact.”
Middlebrooks concluded that the Trump lawsuit was brought for the “equally improper purposes” of harassment, punishment, fundraising, and “to advance a political agenda.”
In the sanctions order, the judge also called out Habba’s September 2022 words about him on Fox News to host Sean Hannity.
“Undeterred by my Order and two rounds of briefing by multiple defendants, Ms. Habba continued to advance Plaintiff’s claims,” the judge said of Habba, before noting she blamed the dismissal of the meritless suit on having a “Clinton judge”:
Because when you have a Clinton judge as we did here, Judge Middlebrooks who I had asked to recuse himself but insisted that he didn’t need to, he was going to be impartial, and then proceeds to write a 65-page scathing order where he basically ignored every factual basis which was backed up by indictments, by investigations, the Mueller report, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, not to mention Durham, and all the testimony we heard there, we get dismissed. Not only do we get dismissed, he says that this is not the proper place for recourse for Donald Trump. He has no legal ramifications. Where what [sic] is the proper place for him? Because the FBI won’t help when you can do anything, obstruct justice, blatantly lie to the FBI, Sussmann’s out, he gets acquitted, where do you go? That’s the concern for me, where do you get that — that recourse?
Law&Crime’s coverage aside, a quick Google search shows that the media did, in fact, widely cover Middlebrooks’ sanctioning of Trump and Habba.
The Trump team’s quest to remove Middlebrooks from the case did not end there, however, as in August 2023 the plaintiff renewed efforts to disqualify the judge — because he was researching facts and had “entered orders accepting Defendants’ narration of the ‘facts’ as true.”
“Plaintiff and his counsel seek disqualification because of the politically charged language in the Court’s recent opinions and the extrajudicial factual research performed by the Court, at its own initiative, in coming to those decisions,” said the second motion to disqualify. “Regardless of whether the Court is actually biased against a party or its counsel, such instances provide the appearance of bias. Disqualification is especially important when the case is in the public eye, as is this one.”
Two weeks later, Hillary Clinton weighed in through her lawyers, calling the second judge removal bid “wholly meritless” and “as meritless as the first.”
But Middlebrooks in August denied the second motion to disqualify because the Trump team had noticed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, divesting him of jurisdiction.
Even so, the judge wrote that if he did have jurisdiction he “would not grant the motion” and did not see the Trump team’s complaint as raising a “substantial issue.” Middlebrooks also bristled at Trump complaints about the court basing its decisions on research.
“Movants complain that I ‘went above and beyond’ the defendants’ arguments and conducted ‘extrajudicial research,”” the judge wrote. “This seems to be a pejorative misnomer. In my two orders on sanctions, I conducted limited independent judicial research in every instance in response to arguments made by the parties. I looked at judicial decisions, legal filings, and statements not subject to dispute and directly made by Mr. Trump and his lawyers. In each instance, I cited the source for the information.”
In closing, Middlebrooks again stated clearly that the RICO lawsuit was both “frivolous” and “harmful.”
“The case before me was frivolous, its purpose was improper and part of a pattern of behavior harmful to the Rule of Law,” he said. “Article III judges have an obligation to protect the administration of justice from abuse.”
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