President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to revive his dismissed lawsuit against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reopening a fight over political power in which the courts are also weapons. The suit accuses Clinton and other political adversaries of conspiring to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign by linking it to Russia. A federal judge dismissed the case and ordered Trump and his former attorney, Alina Habba, to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions.
Trump’s attorneys now want the high court to intervene. In 2025, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal and sanctions after a lower-court ruling found the claims legally insufficient, with some filed too late. Powerful political figures are contesting the case through an apparatus ordinary people don’t control: federal courts, appeals and sanctions.
A lawsuit dismissed, then sanctioned
Trump filed the lawsuit in 2022 against Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, the Democratic National Committee and others. He accused them of bolstering allegations that his campaign colluded with Russia as part of an effort to sabotage his presidential bid.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks dismissed the case in September 2022. Middlebrooks later sanctioned Trump and Habba, calling the lawsuit a “two-hundred-page political manifesto” and accusing Trump, who wasn’t in office at the time of the challenge, of using the courts to advance political grievances.
The appeals court’s three-judge panel unanimously upheld the dismissal and sanctions. The panel included Trump appointee Andrew Brasher, and it found many of the lawsuit’s arguments “frivolous.” The judgment didn’t settle the political dispute. It kept the claims out of court, while leaving Trump free to ask the Supreme Court to step in.
The presidency invoked as shield
In Friday’s filing, Trump’s attorneys argued that lower courts improperly punished them for pursuing legitimate legal claims, Reuters reported. They wrote that the decision reflected “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.”
They added: “The court's intervention is necessary to protect the presidency, and to prevent judicial disagreement from becoming a license to punish its advocates.” The language presents sanctions against a president and his lawyer as a threat to the presidency itself. Meanwhile, people named in the suit face renewed allegations as Trump pushes the case back toward the country’s highest court.
Late Friday night, the lawsuit appeared on the Supreme Court’s online docket system, but the page didn’t yet list the reported filing. The latest document available in the legal challenge was a late-August application seeking more time to file the appeal. Justice Clarence Thomas approved that request, extending the deadline to Friday, Oct. 9.
Political grievance in court
Trump’s appeal follows recent comments about actions he said he could have taken against Clinton and former Presidents Obama and Biden. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden,” Trump told reporters while discussing the possibility of facing another impeachment if Democrats regained control of Congress.
The account describes no grassroots organizing, mutual aid or community response. All the remedies and arguments it outlines sit inside the courts and the political establishment. The latest move asks the Supreme Court to decide whether to reopen a suit already dismissed and sanctioned in lower courts. For now, the reported filing had not yet appeared on the court’s online docket.