It’s another day of winning for the Trump White House. A federal judge just tossed the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit alleging Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was a sore loser legal push. Some Russians might have met with Trump officials, which means there was a conspiracy. Nope. The report filed by ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller totally axed that narrative, noting that there was no evidence that any collusion occurred. With that, the report totally debunked most of the already unverified Trump dossier, which started this circus in the first place. The document was an opposition research project funded by the Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign, which hired Fusion GPS to get dirt on Trump. Fusion hired ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele to compile this file that was reportedly used as credible evidence to secure a FISA spy warrant against former Trump campaign official Carter Page. That’s a whole other off-ramp story along the massive highway that is the Russian collusion myth.
Back to the lawsuit, the judge was quite clear, there was no wrongdoing on behalf of the Trump campaign since they didn’t break any laws concerning obtaining the information from the Wikileaks dump. Those emails from John Podesta and the Clinton campaign aired out a lot of dirty laundry and made things quite awkward on the eve of their 2016 convention in Philadelphia. In short, the judge, a Clinton appointee, took a hatchet to the Democrats’ case, saying it was divorced from the facts (via Fox News):
A federal judge in frank terms Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) against key members of the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over hacked DNC documents, saying they "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and therefore bore no legal liability for disseminating the information.
The ruling came as Democrats increasingly have sought to tie the Trump team to illegal activity in Russia, in spite of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's findings that the campaign in fact refused multiple offers by Russians to involve them in hacking and disinformation efforts.
The DNC asserted in court filings that the Trump team's meetings "with persons connected to the Russian government during the time that the Russian GRU agents were stealing the DNC's information" were "circumstantial evidence" that they were conspiring with the Russians to "steal and disseminate the DNC's materials."
Thet suit did not allege that the stolen materials were false or defamatory but rather sought to hold the Trump team and other defendants liable for the theft of the DNC's information under various Virginia and federal statutes, including laws protecting trade secrets.
However, Judge John Koeltl, a Bill Clinton appointee sitting in the Southern District of New York, wrote in his 81-page opinion Tuesday that the DNC's argument was "entirely divorced" from the facts.
The DNC first filed its suit in April 2018, and the defendants responded that the First Amendment legally protected the dissemination of stolen materials.
"In short, the DNC raises a number of connections and communications between the defendants and with people loosely connected to the Russian Federation, but at no point does yhe DNC allege any facts ... to show that any of the defendants -- other than the Russian Federation -- participated in the theft of the DNC's information," Koeltl said.
"Nor does the DNC allege that the defendants ever agreed to help the Russian Federation steal the DNC's documents," he added.
The DNC claimed the defendants illegally compromised their trade secrets contained in some of the stolen documents -- including donor lists and strategies. But, the judge said, any such claim to trade secrecy was lost when the documents became public in the first place, and in any event, the newsworthiness of the matter trumped the trade secrecy issue.
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Oh, and it gets even more brutal, as Fox added that even if the Russians had provided the information from the hack directly to the Trump team, it would not be illegal since the campaign proper did not participate with the electronic intrusion.
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