Former US President, Donald Trump filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and 26 other people and entities that he claims conspired together to undermine his 2016 campaign by falsely tying him to Russia. The lawsuit list a wide cast of characters that Trump has accused of years of orchestrating a “deep state” conspiracy against him — including former FBI Director James Comey and other FBI officials, the retired British spy Christopher Steele and his associates, and a handful of Clinton campaign advisers.
The lawsuit which is over 108 pages rails against many of Trump’s political opponents and highlights the grievances that he has complained about for years. It claims Democrats and government officials perpetrated a grab bag of offenses, from a racketeering conspiracy to malicious prosecution, computer fraud, and theft of secret internet data. The lawsuit asks for more than $24 million in costs and damages. The suit also contains some factual inaccuracies and some of the same grandiose or exaggerated false claims that Trump has made dozens of times.
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The lawsuit alleges that Clinton and top Democrats hired lawyers and researchers to fabricate information tying Trump to Russia, and then peddled those lies to the media and the US government, in hopes of hobbling his chances of winning in 2016. Trump claims they were assisted by “Clinton loyalists” at the FBI, who abused their powers to investigate him out of political animus.
Trump’s lawsuit claims that Clinton and the other defendants conspired to trigger an “unfounded investigation” by the FBI into potential Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. Multiple federal judges upheld the legality of that investigation, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller and uncovered dozens of connections between Trump associates and Russian officials.
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The investigation established that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win, through a hack-and-leak operation against Clinton, and with a sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting US voters on social media. The probe also found that Trump’s campaign sought to capitalize on Russia’s interference, though it did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump aides and any Russians.
Some legal experts quickly weighed in on Trump’s lawsuit Thursday, dismissing it as a meritless political stunt.