Over the past several years—including the four he was President of the United States—Donald Trump spent enough time talking about Hillary Clinton that he could have likely declared it a second job. When he isn’t leading groups of MAGA-heads in a rousing rendition of “Lock her up!,” he has come up with increasingly immature nicknames for her (Crazy Hillary, Crooked Hillary, Heartless Hillary, and the kinda folksy Lyin’ Hillary all spring to mind), and just generally attempting to besmirch her reputation whenever he can.
While the former president is undoubtedly an unpredictable man, the news that has now filed a totally bonkers RICO lawsuit against Clinton, the DNC, and several others, claiming that they engaged in a criminal conspiracy to “destroy his life”—which is something Trump is clearly fully capable of doing all on his own.
As Bess Levin writes for Vanity Fair:
In a 108-page filing, Trump claimed that Clinton, along with the Democratic National Committee, former FBI director James Comey, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and more than a dozen other people “orchestrated an unthinkable plot” to undermine his campaign and subsequently his administration, by “weav[ing] a false narrative” that Trump “was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” i.e. Russia. While the allegations are both vast and likely baseless, the basic idea is that Clinton and company tried to take down Trump the candidate and then Trump the president through illegal espionage and other subterfuge. The complaint argues that the alleged conspiracy falls under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, i.e. the law that was originally passed to prosecute the Mafia.
“The Defendants, blinded by political ambition, orchestrated a malicious conspiracy to disseminate patently false and injurious information about Donald J. Trump and his campaign, all in the hopes of destroying his life, his political career and rigging the 2016 Presidential Election in favor of Hillary Clinton,” the filing reads. “When their gambit failed, and Donald J. Trump was elected, the Defendants’ efforts continued unabated, merely shifting their focus to undermining his presidential administration. Worse still, the Defendants continue to spread their vicious lies to this day as they unabashedly publicize their thoroughly debunked falsehoods in an effort to ensure that he will never be elected again.”
Yes, it’s OK if you’re chuckling a bit right now. Though you’ve got to give the man some credit for being proactive if he does indeed decide to run for president again and either doesn’t win the Republican nomination or the election itself. It also speaks to Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, so: win-win-win.
As far as the Russia investigation goes, The Washington Post made sure to remind readers that “Despite Trump’s repeated claims that he was exonerated by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III after a two-year investigation, Mueller in 2019 said only that his team had made no determination on ‘collusion’ and that it had not found sufficient evidence to charge any member of Trump’s campaign with criminal conspiracy.” Translation: He was never exonerated.
As Levin notes, the downside to the lawsuit for Trump’s most loyal followers is that he has filed it as a civil suit, meaning that the former POTUS won’t be responsible for anyone “locking her up.” Instead, Trump is looking to score a $72 million-plus payday for his “pain and suffering.”
(Via Vanity Fair)