Trump Takes Hillary to the Supreme Court

The Russia story is going back to court, and this time the president wants the highest court in the land to hear it.

On Friday, Oct. 9, President Trump asked the Supreme Court to revive the lawsuit he filed in 2022 against Hillary Clinton and others, accusing them of conspiring to tie his 2016 campaign to Russia. The defendants included former FBI Director James Comey, the Democratic National Committee and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The petition also asks the Court to throw out the sanctions lower courts imposed on Trump and his lawyers.

How the case got here

U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of Florida dismissed the amended complaint in September 2022, finding the claims legally insufficient and some of them filed too late. He then ordered sanctions in two rounds: $66,274.23 against Trump's lawyers in November 2022 and $937,989.39 in January 2023. Trump, his lawyer Alina Habba and her firm were held jointly liable for the larger amount. "This case should never have been brought," the judge wrote. In November 2025, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal and the sanctions.

Trump's lawyers now argue the rulings reflect "a deeply troubling trend of federal courts using sanctions and disciplinary threats to punish the president and his lawyers for legitimate legal positions that those courts (erroneously) reject," and that Supreme Court review is needed to protect the presidency. The petition was filed after Justice Clarence Thomas granted two deadline extensions. The justices have not agreed to hear the case, and most petitions are denied.

What the record already shows

Whatever happens to the lawsuit, some facts about 2016 are no longer in dispute. In 2022, the Federal Election Commission fined the DNC $105,000 and the Clinton campaign $8,000 for misreporting payments that funded the opposition research behind the Steele dossier as legal expenses. In May 2023, Special Counsel John Durham faulted the FBI for opening a full investigation into the Trump campaign based on "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence." Durham did not recommend new charges.

The take

Conservatives do not need a court to tell them the Russia investigation was a disaster. The FBI's own handling of it was condemned by the Justice Department's special counsel. The people who paid for the dossier were fined for misreporting what the payments were for. For years, a sitting president governed under a cloud fed in part by research that the people funding it labeled as legal fees.

So the instinct behind this petition is understandable. Trump was the target, and he wants accountability.

But readers deserve a straight assessment, too. Losing a case is not the same as being wronged by the court, and the lower courts found real legal problems with this one, including timing. The Supreme Court takes only a small fraction of the cases it is asked to hear. The most likely outcome is that the justices decline, and the sanctions stand.

The stronger argument in the petition is the one about sanctions. Courts should be careful about punishing lawyers for bringing aggressive claims on behalf of any client, and especially on behalf of a president. If the justices do take up anything here, that is the question most likely to draw their interest, and it is a question that matters to lawyers on the left as much as the right.

Either way, the history of 2016 is already written in public records: the fines, the special counsel's findings and the years of damage. A lawsuit may or may not add a chapter. The facts that matter most are already on the record.

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