Recently, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District Florida imposed stiff monetary sanctions under Fed. R. Civ. P. 11 on the lawyers for the plaintiff in Donald Trump v. Hillary Clinton et al., No. 22-CV-14102 (S.D. Fl. Nov. 11, 2022) (ECF 284). (Judge Middlebrooks had already dismissed the claim on the merits, which is currently subject to appeal before the Eleventh Circuit.) The complaint alleged a vast civil RICO conspiracy by those associated with the 2016 Clinton campaign to undermine President Trump by vilifying him with fabricated information tying him to Russia. This information was collected in the so-called “Steele Dossier,” and has been the subject of criminal investigation and one indictment upon which the defendant was recently acquitted.

The movant for Rule 11 sanctions, however, was not Secretary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, nor any of the more well-known public officials or figures who were among the 31 eventual defendants in this action. Rather, the movant was Mr. Charles Dolan, a public relations executive who steadfastly claimed that he had nothing to do with the Clinton campaign beyond some door-to-door canvassing, but whom the original complaint falsely identified as the chair of the DNC, later modified to be the chair of an unnamed “national Democratic political organization” (also false), and who according to the amended complaint was the source of a false story about lurid sexual activity in a Moscow hotel contained in the Steele Dossier. There were also other, less consequential factual inaccuracies, such as claiming that Mr. Dolan was a resident of New York when he was and is a resident of Virginia.

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