A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a request by former President Donald Trump to step down from overseeing Trump’s swearing-in lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, a campaigner and former FBI and Justice Department official. Trump’s lawyers said in their acquittal request that U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks should resign because he was appointed to the federal seat by then-President Bill Clinton. “Due to the fact that Judge Middlebrooks has a relationship with the accused, HILLARY CLINTON’s husband, through his appointment as a judge in this Court, this amounts to bias so aggressive or pervasive as to constitute bias against a party,” she said. their deposit. . Middlebrooks in his decision on Wednesday acknowledged that Bill Clinton had appointed him to court. “Although former President Clinton is not part of this lawsuit, I will give the Plaintiff the benefit of the doubt and equate the Clinton interests for the sake of analysis here,” the statement said. Even so, the judge ruled that Trump’s argument could not be tolerated, writing that “in order to justify the dismissal, there must be more to my appointment than twenty-five years ago by the wife of a party now before me. ». He also noted that the three cases mentioned in Trump’s acquittal “do not impose a different conclusion and do not really seem to support his arguments.” In an accompanying footnote, Middlebrooks said that in the first case, Hamm v. took place at the trial “. None of the cases mentioned “discussed whether a judicial appointment by one party, without further ado, would give a reasonable person suspicion of prejudice on the part of the presiding judge,” Middlebrooks wrote. And the decision in one of them “stressed that, in order to prove a bias that justifies the exclusion, a party must show” so much pervasive bias and prejudice that it constitutes bias against a party “- a proof that has certainly not been made here. In general, “the law is well established” that the mere appointment to a seat by a party does not “create in rational minds … a perception that [the judge’s] ability to execute judicial responsibilities with integrity, impartiality and competence [would be] reduced, “Middlebrooks concluded, citing the Judicial Code of Conduct. Wednesday’s ruling was widely expected, as Politico said it was extremely rare for courts to approve dismissal proposals based on the political party of the president-designate. Middlebrooks also made this point, writing: “Each federal judge is appointed by a president affiliated with a major political party, and therefore each federal judge could theoretically be held accountable, to some degree or another.” “As judges, we must all go beyond politics,” he continued. “When I became a federal judge, I swore to ‘perform faithfully and impartially and perform all duties… in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the United States.’ Να I have done so for the past twenty-five years. and this case will not be different “. Trump’s sweeping blackmail lawsuit against Clinton and the other defendants accused them of plotting to fabricate evidence during the 2016 campaign that bound him to “hostile foreign rule.” He rejected any “fabricated Trump-Russia relationship.” He also recalled other allegations made by Trump about former Attorney General Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s campaign and the 2016 election. In particular, he said that Mueller acquitted “Donald Trump and his campaign by finding that there was no evidence of collusion with Russia.” “The Mueller Report shows that, after a two-year investigation following a two-year FBI investigation, the Attorney General found no evidence that Donald Trump or his campaign ever conspired with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election,” he said. Mueller concluded in 2019 that the Russian government intervened in the 2016 US election to harm Clinton and push Trump to the Oval Office. However, his final report clarified that the investigators evaluated the relevant facts from “the framework of the law on conspiracy, not the concept of” collusion “. Prosecutors eventually found that there was “insufficient evidence” to accuse someone in Trump’s campaign of conspiracy against Moscow. However, they noted that the campaign “expected to benefit electorally” from Russia’s efforts. Hillary Clinton’s spokeswoman Nick Merrill said in an earlier statement to Insider that the lawsuit was “nonsense.” Charles R. Davis contributed to the petition.
