Clinton-Appointed Judge Dumps DNC’s Lawsuit Against Trump Campaign; Trump Responds
By James Barrett
“Yet another total & complete vindication & exoneration…”
On Tuesday, a Bill Clinton-appointed U.S. district judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee against the Trump campaign for its alleged role in the hacking and dissemination of internal Democratic Party emails during the 2016 presidential race. In his opinion issued Tuesday, Judge John Koeltl torches the key premises of the DNC’s racketeering suit, including the Trump campaign’s role in the hacking of the emails and the very notion that disseminating information “plainly of the type entitled to the strongest protection that the First Amendment offers” is legally actionable.
The DNC’s lawsuit was filed against Donald Trump, his campaign officials and “defendants” — including Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, George Papadopoulos, Richard Gates and Roger Stone — WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, the Russian Federation, and various Russian individuals. The DNC’s allegation: that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russians and WikiLeaks to release Democratic Party officials’ emails in order to benefit then-candidate Trump.
But, as Koeltl details in his 80+ page opinion, neither the evidence nor the law back up the DNC’s complaint. The lawsuit itself alleged that the Russian Federation alone actually hacked the DNC’s servers and gained access to the emails, not the Trump campaign. “The primary wrongdoer in this alleged criminal activity is undoubtedly the Russian Federation,” Koeltl writes, but, he continues, “under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act…, the Russian Federation cannot be sued” in U.S. courts.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks, not the Trump campaign, actually published the documents, but, Koeltl maintains, Assange’s controversial organization cannot be sued because their actions fall under constitutional protections for the release of information that serves the public interest. “The DNC seeks to hold the second-level participants in this alleged activity [the Trump campaign, campaign defendants and WikiLeaks] liable for dissemination of stolen materials,” Koeltl writes. “But … the First Amendment prevents such liability in the same way it would preclude liability for press outlets that publish materials of public interest[.]”
Koeltl went further: Even if the Trump campaign had itself had obtained and published the documents, it too would have been protected under the First Amendment because the documents “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election,” and thus constitutes information “entitled to the strongest protection that the First Amendment offers.”
full story at https://www.dailywire.com/news/50082/clinton-appointed-judge-dumps-dncs-lawsuit-against-james-barrett