President Trump asked the Supreme Court on Friday to revive his dismissed lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and other political adversaries. The request follows lower-court orders requiring Trump and his former attorney, Alina Habba, to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions.
The Sanctions Fight
Trump’s appeal challenges the dismissal and the financial penalty. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision and sanctions in 2025. In Friday’s filing, Trump’s attorneys argued that the lower courts punished them for pursuing legitimate legal claims.
The attorneys 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 dispute puts the presidency and its legal advocates at the center of a fight over what courts may penalize. The nearly $1 million order names Trump and Habba as those required to pay; the base article doesn’t identify a recipient for the sanctions.
A Lawsuit Against Political Adversaries
Trump filed the lawsuit in 2022. He accused Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, the Democratic National Committee and others of conspiring to undermine his presidential bid by bolstering allegations that his campaign colluded with Russia. The case targeted former government officials and a political party, not a dispute over wages, jobs or public services.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks dismissed the case in September 2022. He found the claims legally insufficient, with some filed too late. Middlebrooks later sanctioned Trump and Habba, calling the lawsuit a “two-hundred-page political manifesto.” He accused Trump, who wasn’t in office at the time of the challenge, of using the courts to advance political grievances.
A unanimous three-judge appeals court panel upheld the dismissal and sanctions. Trump appointee Andrew Brasher sat on the panel, which found many of the lawsuit’s arguments “frivolous.”
The appeal followed Trump’s recent comments that he could have taken action against Clinton and former Presidents Obama and Biden but chose not to out of respect for the presidency. “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 Supreme Court Filing
By 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 most recent document available in the legal challenge was a late-August application seeking more time to file the appeal.
Justice Clarence Thomas approved that request and extended the deadline to Friday, Oct. 9. Trump’s attorneys filed the appeal on that deadline, asking the court to intervene in the lower courts’ treatment of the case and its lawyers.
The filing asks the Supreme Court to reopen a case that a district judge dismissed and an appeals panel unanimously rejected. The court’s decision will determine whether those rulings and the sanctions remain in place.