President Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to revive his 2022 lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to tie his 2016 campaign to Russia after lower courts dismissed it and imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions.
The filing seeks to reverse a September 2022 dismissal and the later sanctions order that hit Trump and his then-attorney Alina Habba. Newsmax reported the petition comes after the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed both the dismissal and the penalties in November 2025.
Named defendants in the original complaint included Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, the Democratic National Committee, and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The suit charged them with a coordinated effort to link Trump’s 2016 campaign to Russia.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks threw the case out and later described the filing in stark terms.
"two-hundred-page political manifesto"
Middlebrooks imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions on Trump and Habba in January 2023. A three-judge appeals panel unanimously upheld that decision and the underlying dismissal.
The panel, which included Trump appointee Andrew Brasher, stated its view of the legal claims plainly.
"many of Trump's and Habba's legal arguments were indeed frivolous."
Trump’s attorneys told the justices the sanctions fit a larger pattern they want the high court to check. They argued against what they called a deeply troubling trend of federal courts using sanctions to punish the president, and said judicial disagreement should not become a license to punish his lawyers.
Justice Clarence Thomas twice extended the deadline for seeking Supreme Court review, most recently to Oct. 9. The Friday petition met that window.
The Supreme Court ask arrived two days after Trump spoke to reporters in the Oval Office about Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. He said he could have done very bad things to them but chose to respect the presidency. He also predicted Democrats would try to impeach him if they retake Congress.
Those remarks sit against years of legal and political fights that have pulled in Trump family members and campaign finance questions. One recent episode involved Donald Trump Jr. settling a Russian businessman’s funding of a Bahamas wedding celebration.
The 2022 lawsuit itself targeted the origins of the Russia collusion narrative that dominated the years after the 2016 election. Clinton had been Trump’s Democratic opponent that cycle. Comey led the FBI at the critical early stage. Steele authored the dossier that circulated among media and officials.
Lower courts treated the complaint as an abuse of process rather than a viable claim. Middlebrooks’s sanctions order and the 11th Circuit’s affirmance left Trump and Habba facing a nearly seven-figure penalty for pressing it.
Trump’s legal team now asks the Supreme Court to step in on both the dismissal and the money judgment. Their core pitch is that disagreement with a president’s lawsuit should not open the door to punishing the lawyers who file it.
That argument lands in a broader climate of investigations and defensive spending. Trump has moved to earmark PAC millions for family legal defense as Democrats signal fresh midterm probes.
The 11th Circuit panel’s unanimous ruling gave the sanctions a clean appellate stamp. Because Brasher, a Trump appointee, joined the decision, the opinion carried no partisan split on the circuit bench.
Still, the petition frames the case as larger than one dismissed complaint. It presents the nearly $1 million penalty as evidence that courts have begun using fee awards and sanctions to deter the president from challenging political opponents in court.
Media handling of Trump-related stories has itself drawn scrutiny in recent coverage cycles, including cases where ABC News deleted a Trump sons contracts story and offered no explanation.
The timeline is straightforward. The 2016 campaign produced the original Russia allegations. In 2022 Trump sued. Middlebrooks dismissed the action that September and added sanctions the following January. The 11th Circuit affirmed everything in November 2025. Thomas then gave the president extra time to seek review. The Friday filing used that time.
No full case caption or docket number appears in the available reporting. The operative facts remain the ones already litigated: a lengthy complaint, a district-court dismissal, heavy sanctions, and an appellate green light for both.
Trump has also tested institutional boundaries in other arenas, including moments when he signed orders that left the Supreme Court reacting after the fact. The current petition stays inside the ordinary certiorari process.
What the justices will do with the application is unknown. They can deny review and leave the sanctions intact, or they can take the case and examine whether lower courts overstepped when they turned a dismissed political lawsuit into a nearly $1 million bill.
For now the record shows a president who lost at the district court, lost again at the circuit court, and has asked the Supreme Court to restore a suit that accused his 2016 opponent and senior law-enforcement figures of manufacturing a Russia collusion narrative against him.
When courts treat a challenge to that narrative as a sanctionable offense, voters can decide whether the real abuse was the lawsuit or the punishment that followed.
