Chances are, Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks already thinks Trump’s $72+ million lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Jim Comey and others is a joke. Trump accused them of having “maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative” about Russian collusion during the 2016 race. NBC’s Justice Correspondent Pete Williams described the suit as “basically, any grievance that Donald Trump ever had against his opponents, all packaged up as a lawsuit." Legal experts have called the case “deeply flawed and utterly hopeless” and worthy of sanctions against both Trump and his lawyers.
You can almost hear the judge snickering in his smack down of Trump’s motion. Judge Middlebrooks first pointed out that former President Clinton is not a party to the lawsuit before adding that even assuming the two Clintons’ interests are equated, there are still no grounds for recusal.
Judge Middlebrooks has produced five pages yeeting the former president’s motion out of his courtroom. https://t.co/jljN7UxUdp pic.twitter.com/Ffbi4OLsWU
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) April 7, 2022
But the best part was Footnote 3. There, Judge Middlebrooks really stuck it to Trump:
I note that Plaintiff filed this lawsuit in the Fort Pierce Division of this District, where only one federal judge sits: Judge Aileen Cannon, who Plaintiff appointed in 2020. Despite the odds, this case landed with me instead. And when Plaintiff is a litigant before a judge that he himself appointed, he does not tend to advance these same sorts of bias concerns.
The judge then cited three Trump legal cases in which he was fine with Trump-appointed judges.
The judge's decision does not bode well for the rest of Trump's lawsuit but, as C&L’s Susie Madrak wrote when the suit was filed, it’s probably more about fundraising than any legal outcome.
