CNN | Former President Donald Trump filed a sprawling federal lawsuit on Thursday against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and 26 other people and entities that he claims conspired to undermine his 2016 campaign by falsely tying him to Russia.
The
lawsuit names a wide cast of characters that Trump has accused for
years of orchestrating a "deep state" conspiracy against him --
including former FBI Director James Comey and other FBI officials, the retired British spy Christopher Steele and his associates, and a handful of Clinton campaign advisers.
"Under
the guise of 'opposition research,' 'data analytics,' and other
political stratagems, the Defendants nefariously sought to sway the
public's trust," says the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Florida.
"They worked together with a single, self-serving purpose: to vilify
Donald J. Trump."
Over
108 pages, the lawsuit rails against many of Trump's political
opponents and highlights the grievances that he has complained about for
years. It claims Democrats and government officials perpetrated a grab
bag of offenses, from a racketeering conspiracy to a malicious
prosecution, computer fraud and theft of secret internet data. The
lawsuit asks for more than $24 million in costs and damages.
The suit also contains some factual inaccuracies and some of the same grandiose or exaggerated false claims that Trump has made dozens of times.
The
civil suit alleges that Clinton and top Democrats hired lawyers and
researchers to fabricate information tying Trump to Russia, and then
peddled those lies to the media and to the US government, in hopes of
hobbling his chances of winning in 2016. Trump claims they were assisted
by "Clinton loyalists" at the FBI, who abused their powers to
investigate him out of political animus.
John
Podesta, the chairman of Clinton's 2016 campaign and one of the
lawsuit's defendants, tweeted that part of the suit might be a "hoot."
"Do
you think Trump filed this case with the hope of calling Vladimir Putin
as a character witness? Trump deposition ought to be a hoot," Podesta wrote.
CNN
has reached out to many of the defendants for comment. Some attorneys
for defendants named in the lawsuit were still digesting it on Thursday.
