On Tuesday, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that had been filed by disgraced former National Security Council aide Alexander Vindman against former President Donald Trump.
Politico reports that Mr. Vindman’s lawsuit, which claims that his civil rights had been violated by several top Trump Administration officials, was thrown out by Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court. Mr. Vindman specifically named Donald Trump Jr., former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, former Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, and former Deputy White House Communications Director Julia Hahn as the officials who he believed had smeared him publicly.
Judge Boasberg, however, determined that Mr. Vindman did not have a legal basis to sue the four officials under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, declaring that “political hackery alone does not violate” that law. However, the Obama-appointed Boasberg hinted at his support for Mr. Vindman’s overall cause despite the lack of legal standing, adding that “the court does not decide the validity of those attacks, regardless of whether some were outside the bounds of appropriate political discourse.”
Boasberg openly compared Mr. Vindman’s lawsuit to a similar case brought against President Trump by rioters who falsely claimed to have been attacked by police as they were cleared out of Lafayette Square in June of 2020. President Trump then walked across the square with several top officials from the Administration to stand in front of the St. John’s Episcopal Church, showing solidarity after the historic church had been attacked and almost burned down by rioters the previous night.
The judge threw out that lawsuit, Boasberg pointed out, “held that those plaintiffs had alleged facts that, if true, showed only that the defendants were communicating with each other to jointly clear the square — not that they had formed an unlawful agreement to violate the plaintiffs’ rights based on membership in a protected class.”
Mr. Vindman rose to infamy as one of the first people to publicly accuse President Trump of wrongdoing during his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019, where the two leaders discussed possible investigations into corruption by the Biden family in that country. Democrats immediately and falsely accused President Trump of attempting to pressure a foreign ally into investigating one of his political opponents, and his first impeachment trial over the call ended with acquittal.