July 7, 2018

Federal Judge Dismisses Trivial Lawsuit

US District Court Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle.

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Last year, a couple of Democratic donors and a former mid-level staffer for the DNC filed a longshot suit against Roger Stone and the Trump campaign. They alleged that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to hack the DNC email server and publish the hacked material on Wikileaks. As a result, some of their personal information became public and caused them personal hardship: Social Security numbers were disclosed, they became targets of identity theft, family relationships were strained when one of them was outed as gay, etc. All of this led to “anxiety and distress.”

This was never likely to go anywhere and was barely even reported at the time. It had nothing to do with any Democratic Party organization. It was just three guys who filed a suit. Unsurprisingly, on Friday the suit was dismissed on technical grounds:

U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle said in a ruling Tuesday evening that the suit’s efforts to tie the Trump campaign and Stone’s alleged actions to the nation’s capital were too flimsy for the case to proceed in a Washington, D.C., court….But Huvelle made clear that her decision was a technical one based on issues of legal jurisdiction and was not a definitive ruling on allegations that the Trump campaign struck an illicit deal with the Russians during the presidential contest.

“It bears emphasizing that this Court’s ruling is not based on a finding that there was no collusion between defendants and Russia during the 2016 presidential election,” Huvelle wrote. “This is the wrong forum for plaintiffs’ lawsuit. The Court takes no position on the merits of plaintiffs’ claims.“

So that’s that. It was a nothingburger case and the judge made no substantive ruling. Naturally that didn’t stop President Trump, who must have heard about it on Fox & Friends or something:

Trump didn’t win anything. The suit was not filed by the DNC. There was no ruling one way or the other about collusion with Russia. His entire tweet is a lie from beginning to end. As usual.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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