Legal expert: Trump has only himself to blame for his latest courthouse flop
According to an attorney and contributor to the conservative Federalist Society, Donald Trump's attempt to sue former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was doomed from the start and compounded by his attempt to "judge shop" by employing an "incompetent" family law attorney to plead his case.
Writing for the Bulwark, attorney Corbin Barthold ridiculed the former president's latest courthouse flop by beginning, "Donald Trump has what might charitably be called a poor relationship with judges. It’s not clear that he even understands what they do."
With that out of the way, the legal columnist noted a "curious aspect of Trump’s latest legal publicity stunt, a civil racketeering action in which the former president alleges that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, and James Comey, among many others, conspired to rig the 2016 election. The curious thing is that Trump’s lawyer (about whom more later) chose to file the complaint in Fort Pierce, Florida."
According to Barthold, Trump's attorney in this case, Peter Ticktin, who has a history of being suspended, tried to get the case handled in Fort Pierce, a part of the Southern District of Florida, which has only one judge who also happens to have been appointed by Trump.
That, Barthold, wrote was a big mistake.
"It didn’t work out that way. Sometimes, usually to balance caseloads, a court shifts filings in one division to a judge sitting in another. That happened here, and Trump drew Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who is stationed back in Trump’s Palm Beach stomping ground. In a delicious bit of irony—assuming that plaintiff Donald Trump indeed reached for a Trump-appointed judge—the lawsuit is now before a judge appointed by the husband of defendant Hillary Clinton," he wrote before adding, "This is when your average county-court hustler would see that the plan had backfired, shrug it off, and proceed to some new scheme. Trump’s legal team did not do this. Instead, they moved to disqualify Judge Middlebrooks. That the judge was appointed by Bill Clinton 'amounts,' they contended, 'to prejudice so virulent or pervasive as to constitute bias' against Trump."
He continued, "If there really were some colorable ground for recusal, Trump’s attorneys could be relied on to miss it. The motion contained nothing that could fairly be called a reasoned argument. No one with viable mental faculties proofread it. It was filed before any of the defendants even appeared in the case," adding, "Cynicism hitched to indolence—an alliance of mendacity and incompetence—drove the filing of this motion. That Trump’s lawyers are this bad tells you all you need to know about the lawsuit itself."
As for Trump's attorney -- who can be found at www.legalbrains.com -- Barthold said Trump got exactly not only what could have been expected, but also what he deserved.
"You will also learn that he [Trump's latest attorney] devotes his time to the usual practices of a country lawyer—family law, personal injury, estates and trusts—which props up one’s surmise that, when the task at hand is taking down the arrayed forces of the Deep State, he does not receive the first phone call. Yet this is Trump’s man on the spot," he wrote. "This is the best advocate that a former president of the United States, at this point, can get."
You can read more here.
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