President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to reopen his long-dismissed lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, the Democratic National Committee, and others over their alleged scheme to torpedo his 2016 presidential campaign by drumming up Russia collusion claims. The petition, filed Friday, also takes direct aim at the nearly $1 million in sanctions a lower court slapped on Trump and his former attorney, Alina Habba.
Trump first brought the case in 2022, arguing that Clinton and her allies orchestrated a coordinated effort to tie his campaign to Moscow. U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks wasn’t buying it. He dismissed the suit in September of that year, calling the claims legally insufficient and some of them flat-out too late. He then ordered Trump and Habba to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions, describing the filing as a “two-hundred-page political manifesto” rather than a real legal complaint. That’s quite a book review.
In 2025, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals piled on, upholding both the dismissal and the sanctions and branding large chunks of the lawsuit’s arguments “frivolous.” One of those three judges, Andrew Brasher, was a Trump appointee, which makes it a little harder for anyone to cry partisan witch hunt on that particular ruling.
Trump’s lawyers aren’t framing this as a sore-loser appeal, though. They’re arguing the lower courts crossed a serious constitutional line. Trump Clinton Supreme Court petition Their filing warned of what they called “a deeply troubling trend of federal courts using sanctions and disciplinary threats to punish the president and his lawyers for legitimate legal positions that those courts (erroneously) reject.” They pressed the justices to intervene, writing that “the court’s intervention is necessary to protect the presidency, and to prevent judicial disagreement from becoming a license to punish its advocates.”
Justice Clarence Thomas had already granted Trump’s team extra time back in August, pushing the deadline to Friday, October 9. The filing landed right on that deadline, which is either disciplined lawyering or cutting it very close, depending on your mood. As of Friday night, the case appeared on the Supreme Court’s online docket, though the reported filing had not yet been formally listed on the page.
Trump himself has kept the 2016 fight very much alive in his public comments. He recently told reporters, “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden,” framing the remarks as evidence of personal restraint out of respect for the presidency. Whether that reads as magnanimous or ominous probably depends on which cable channel you watch.
The justices now have three options: take the case, deny it, or ask for more briefing. Nothing in the record shows they’ve moved yet. For anyone who lived through the years of Russia collusion coverage dominating every headline, this petition is a reminder that the underlying fight never quite died. Trump is now taking it to the only court that can actually reopen the door. Whether the Supreme Court walks through it is the next question.
