"...Trump revives fight over $937,989 fine in failed Clinton suit
Donald Trump is battling to reverse a $937,989 fine levied against him by a federal judge in Florida last year for bringing “frivolous” claims against Hillary Clinton — yet another effort by the former president to fight a string of costly courtroom losses.
Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba, who are jointly liable for the Florida fine, on Tuesday urged the federal appeals court in Atlanta to vacate a sanction they say was a “clear error” made by a politically biased judge. Trump is the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential election.
U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, imposed the penalty in January 2023 after concluding Trump was “using the courts as a stage set for political theater and grievance” by bringing the suit. The judge said “no reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”
Trump posted a bond of $1.03 million — or 110% of the fine — while appealing. That’s an arrangement he’ll soon have to replicate to challenge about $540 million he owes after losing a civil fraud suit brought by the New York attorney general and a defamation case in Manhattan by the writer E. Jean Carroll. Habba represented Trump in those cases, too.
The fine imposed by Middlebrooks is small compared with the two New York cases. Trump lost the civil fraud trial Feb. 16, when a judge ordered him to pay $454 million. Accrued interest alone on that verdict is growing by $111,983 every day he doesn’t pay...."