Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Minden-Tahoe Airport on October 8, 2022 in Minden, Nevada. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
By Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
11/10/2022 06:27 PM EST
A federal judge on Thursday excoriated and sanctioned several members of Donald Trump’s legal team, saying the former president’s massive lawsuit against his former rival, Hillary Clinton, and dozens of other adversaries amounted to an intentional abuse of the legal system.
“These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims,” said U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks, a Florida-based jurist who dismissed Trump’s lawsuit in September. “This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”
Middlebrooks ordered the attorneys to pay $50,000 to the court and more than $16,000 in legal fees to Charles Dolan, one of the defendants, who initiated the sanctions proceedings against Trump’s attorneys. The attorneys ordered to pay the sanctions costs include one of the most prominent members of Trump’s current coterie of lawyers, Alina Habba, as well as his lead local counsel in the Clinton suit, Peter Ticktin, and two others: Michael Madaio and Jamie Sasson.
Ticktin said in an email Thursday that he needed to contact Habba before offering a response to Middlebrooks’ 19-page sanctions order. A spokesperson for Habba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Middlebrooks...
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