Trump files grievance-filled lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and Democrats of carrying out an 'unthinkable plot' to tie his campaign to Russia

• Former President Donald Trump has sued Hillary Clinton and other Democrats over the 2016 campaign.
• The lawsuit claims there was a sprawling and malicious conspiracy to connect him to Russia.

A lawsuit filed Thursday by former President Donald Trump in Florida alleges that he was the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to tie his 2016 campaign to Russia.

Calling it an "unthinkable plot," the legal complaint alleges that Clinton and other defendants — including her 2016 campaign advisors, the Democratic National Committee, and former DOJ and FBI officials — conspired to fabricate evidence tying him to "a hostile foreign sovereignty."

In a statement to Insider, Clinton's spokesman Nick Merrill dismissed the lawsuit as "nonsense."

The lawsuit dismisses any "contrived Trump-Russia link." It also recycles other claims he's previously made about former special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Trump and his campaign.

Specifically, it says that Mueller exonerated "Donald Trump and his campaign with his finding that there was no evidence of collusion with Russia." And it says that the "Mueller Report demonstrated that, after a two-year long investigation coming on the heels of a year-long FBI investigation, the Special Counsel found no evidence that Donald Trump or his campaign ever colluded with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election."

Mueller concluded in 2019 that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 US election to damage Clinton and propel Trump to the Oval Office. But his final report specifies that investigators evaluated the relevant events from "the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of 'collusion.'"

Prosecutors ultimately concluded that there was not "sufficient evidence" to charge anyone on the Trump campaign with conspiring with Moscow. But they noted that the campaign "expected it would benefit electorally" from Russia's efforts.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee also determined in 2020 that members of the Trump campaign had connections to Russian nationals.

For instance, the committee concluded that Paul Manafort, who served as the campaign's chairman for five months in 2016, was a "grave counterintelligence threat" who had "high-level access and [a] willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services."

Before joining the Trump campaign, Manafort worked as a consultant for pro-Russian interests like Ukraine's Party of Regions and the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Senate investigators also uncovered information that raised "the possibility of Manafort's potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations" that took place during the 2016 US election, in which Russian hackers breached the DNC's servers, stole emails, and disseminated them via WikiLeaks and the fake online persona Guccifer 2.0.

The Senate's report also identified Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence operative and associate of Manafort's, as someone who "may be connected" to the effort to influence the 2016 election.

And Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr., welcomed this effort, according to emails that have been publicly released.

Specifically, Trump Jr. was offered "high level and sensitive information" about the Clinton campaign in June 2016 that he was told was "part of Russia and its government's support" for Trump's candidacy. In response, Trump Jr. said, "If it's what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer."

Trump's former longtime fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, also told prosecutors and lawmakers that the Trump family was working on a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Cohen, Manafort, and four others associated with Trump and his campaign eventually pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes in connection to Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. All of them, with the exception of Cohen who has been a vocal Trump critic, were pardoned or had their sentences commuted before Trump left office in January 2021.

The former president's lawsuit comes as he and his allies falsely allege that a recent court filing from the special counsel John Durham — who is tasked with investigating the origins of the Mueller probe — proves that the Clinton campaign illegally spied on Trump during the 2016 campaign and early on in his presidency.

It mischaracterizes several details from the Durham filing, saying that the defendants "resorted to truly subversive measures — hacking servers at Trump Tower, Trump's private apartment, and, most alarmingly, the White House."

But as Insider has reported, the filing in question says nothing of the sort, and Durham himself said in a subsequent filing that "members of the media" may have "misinterpreted" the previous filing.