Supreme Court asked to revive Trump suit judge said should never be brought

President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Friday, October 9, 2026, to revive his lawsuit against former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former Justice Department officials over the 2016 election. The appeal seeks to resurrect a case that a lower court concluded was "frivolous."

Trump filed the suit in 2022 against Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and dozens of other people and entities. He alleged they conspired to undermine his 2016 campaign by falsely tying him to Russia.

A federal district court dismissed the case and ruled that Trump's attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that decision last year.

US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida, nominated to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, wrote that the case "should never have been brought" and that "no reasonable lawyer would have filed it."

The filing asks the justices to intervene in a matter that two lower courts have already rejected and penalized. It has not been granted review; the Supreme Court has only been asked to take it up.

The request lands as the Court's new term already includes major Trump-related matters. The justices agreed to review the president's policy of mandatory detention without bond hearings for people who entered the country illegally.

The appeal also arrives amid weak public standing for the president.

What the Court does with the request is unknown.

What is established is narrower and more concrete: a sitting president is asking the highest court in the country to revive a suit that a federal judge said should never have been filed, and for which his lawyers were ordered to pay nearly $1 million. The institutional question — how courts handle litigation brought by a president against his political opponents — is now before the justices, whether or not they take the case.