Judge Fines Trump Lawyers in Clinton Conspiracy Suit Tossed in September

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Florida imposed sanctions on Thursday against a group of lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump who handled a sprawling lawsuit that accused Hillary Clinton and a range of Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies of a vast conspiracy against him.

The judge, Donald M. Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida, had thrown out the case in September, and in a scathing 19-page ruling, he accused Mr. Trump’s lawyers of abusing the legal system by suing for political purposes in a case that he portrayed as full of misinformation. “Every claim was frivolous, most barred by settled, well-established existing law,” he said.

The ruling comes as the ethics and conduct of a range of lawyers working for Mr. Trump are under scrutiny, including their baseless challenges over the legitimacy of the 2020 election and false statements assuring the Justice Department that Mr. Trump had returned all classified documents in his possession.

In the racketeering case, Judge Middlebrooks, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, wrote, Mr. Trump put forward “political grievances masquerading as legal claims.” He added, “The courts are not intended for performative litigation for purposes of fund-raising and political statements.”

The Trump lawyers who must now pay a fine of $50,000 are Alina Habba, Michael T. Madaio, Peter Ticktin and Jamie Alan Sasson. In a statement, Ms. Habba said that she planned to appeal the decision. The remaining lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers were also ordered to cover about $16,000 in legal fees paid by one of the defendants, Charles Dolan, a Democratic public-relations executive. The penalties issued on Thursday may foreshadow things to come.

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Numerous inquiries. Since leaving office, former President Donald J. Trump has been facing several investigations into his business dealings and political activities. Here is a look at some notable cases:

Jan. 6 investigations. In a series of public hearings, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack laid out a comprehensive narrative of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. This evidence could allow federal prosecutors, who are conducting a parallel criminal investigation, to indict Mr. Trump.

Georgia election interference case. Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta-area district attorney, has been leading a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the efforts of Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. This case could pose the most immediate legal peril for the former president and his associates.

After the judge threw out the lawsuit, Mr. Dolan quickly filed a request for sanctions. But a large group of defendants in the case, including Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. separately filed a joint request for sanctions, which remains pending before the judge.

A lawyer for Mr. Dolan, George Doumar, praised the decision, saying lawsuits like Mr. Trump’s had undermined the legal system.

“We gave Trump’s lawyers multiple warnings, and rather than serve as gatekeepers of the integrity of the court system, they doubled down on unsupported allegations,” he said.

In filing the lawsuit in March, Mr. Trump named 31 people and organizations as defendants. The case amounted to yet another venue for Mr. Trump to air his grievances and conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.

Mr. Dolan was the subject of pro-Trump conspiracy theories after John Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the Russia investigation, mentioned him in an indictment of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who gathered many of the claims in the so-called Steele dossier. (Mr. Danchenko was acquitted last month.)

The dossier is a now-discredited compendium of rumors about purported connections between Mr. Trump and Russia based on political opposition research that Democrats had indirectly funded. It included a notorious claim that Russian intelligence had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.

The indictment described how in the summer of 2016, when Mr. Danchenko visited Moscow, he met with Mr. Dolan, who had been staying at the hotel where the purported tape had supposedly been filmed. He also reportedly toured the suite where Mr. Trump had stayed.

Mr. Durham’s indictment can be read as insinuating that Mr. Dolan might have been involved in the tape rumor. But Mr. Dolan said he had never heard the rumor until BuzzFeed published the dossier in January 2017, and the indictment did not say otherwise.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers, however, accused Mr. Dolan of originating the rumor. They also accused Mr. Dolan of having conspired with Mr. Danchenko to create a dossier to “smear” Mr. Trump, while inaccurately describing him as a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a senior Clinton campaign official.

Mr. Dolan’s lawyers asked that he be dropped from the case, saying their client knew nothing of the sex tape rumor, had not conspired with Mr. Danchenko to create a dossier and had never been chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His support for the Clinton campaign, they said, was limited to knocking on doors as a volunteer.

But Mr. Trump pressed on. After Judge Middlebrooks dismissed the lawsuit and Mr. Dolan asked for sanctions, the Trump team claimed that “nearly all” of the allegations the lawsuit had made against him came from the Danchenko indictment.

That, Judge Middlebrooks wrote “is simply not so,” saying Mr. Trump had instead “cherry-picked portions which supported his narrative while ignoring those that undermined or contradicted it.”

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.