The sanctioned parties — four lawyers and their two law firms — were ordered to pay a $50,000 court penalty and more than $16,000 in attorney fees to one of the named defendants in Trump’s lawsuit. “[L]equitable filings such as those at issue here should be penalized … both to punish this conduct and to deter similar conduct by these attorneys and others,” wrote U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, an appointee of former President Clinton. based in Florida, in a shocking 19-page series. Among the 29 defendants Trump sued was Charles Dolan, whom Trump’s lawyers falsely portrayed in their suit as a former top Democratic official, a close Clinton ally and a New York resident. The lawyers repeated some of those inaccuracies, despite warnings from Dolan’s lawyers, Middlebrooks said. According to the judge’s sanctions order, Trump’s lawsuit contained factual allegations that “were knowingly false or made with reckless disregard for the truth.” Dolan, a one-time Clinton campaign volunteer who initiated the sanctions proposal against Trump’s lawyers, received $16,274 in legal fees. The barristers were Alina Habba, Michael Madaio and their law firm Habba Madaio & Associates, as well as Peter Ticktin, Jamie Alan Sasson and The Ticktin Law Group. Federal judge strikes down Biden’s student debt relief program Sotomayor won’t block vaccine mandate for New York public sector workers “It should come as no surprise that we will be appealing this decision,” Habba said in a statement. In September, Middlebrooks dismissed Trump’s lawsuit accusing dozens of individuals and entities of conspiring to undermine the 2016 presidential election. At the time of the dismissal, the judge referred to Trump’s amended complaint as “a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining the grievances against those who have opposed him”. In Thursday’s sanctions order, the judge noted that the former president’s suit “was, as a whole, frivolous.”
