(LifeSiteNews) – Former President Donald Trump filed a $72 million defamation suit against failed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and various other Democrat figures for their roles in perpetuating the now-infamous story that Trump conspired with the Russian government to rig the 2016 presidential election.
“Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” reads the 108-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. “The actions taken in furtherance of their scheme — falsifying evidence, deceiving law enforcement, and exploiting access to highly-sensitive data sources — are so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.”
In addition to Clinton, the defendants include the Democratic National Committee (DNC), pro-Democrat consulting firm Fusion GPS (which the Clinton campaign hired to find damaging information on Trump), Clinton’s campaign attorney Michael Sussman, Sussman’s former law partner Mark Elias, former Obama administration FBI Director James Comey, Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan, former British intelligence operative and author of the notorious debunked Steele dossier Christopher Steele, several of Steele’s sources, and former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who pled guilty to falsifying the FISA warrant used to spy on 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The suit alleges that the named individuals orchestrated a conspiracy “designed to cripple Trump’s bid for presidency by fabricating a scandal that would be used to trigger an unfounded federal investigation and ignite a media frenzy.” It seeks more than $72 million in damages, arguing that the Russian collusion hoax forced Trump to “incur expenses in an amount to be determined at trial, but known to be in excess of twenty-four million dollars ($24,000,000) and continuing to accrue, in the form of defense costs, legal fees, and related expenses.”
The suit also contends that “the fallout from the Defendants’ actions was not limited to the public denigration” and attorneys’ fees but also led to the federal government wasting “precious time, resources and taxpayer dollars.”
Upon Trump’s victory over Clinton in 2016, Democrats swiftly blamed their defeat on claims that Trump had colluded with the Russian government for largely undefined assistance in winning the election. In May 2017, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the election, and despite numerous examples of pro-Democrat, anti-Trump bias on his part, Mueller’s final March 2019 report admitted that it “did not identify evidence that any US persons conspired or coordinated with” the Kremlin’s efforts to “provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States,” including anyone involved in the Trump campaign, to the bitter disappointment of left-wing activists at the time.
The lawsuit’s prospects in court remain to be seen. Racketeering attorney Jeff Grell told Reuters that the case may be determined to fall outside the four-year statute of limitations on racketeering cases, though given the ongoing nature of many of the activities, it remains to be seen when that four-year period will ultimately be determined to have begun.