Hillary Clinton uses Trump’s own tweets against him in lawsuit over whether he was ‘Putin’s puppet’

Former 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the 20 other defendants named in a bizarre lawsuit filed by former president Donald Trump have asked a judge to dismiss the case because they argue too much time has passed for Mr Trump to sue them.

Mr Trump’s lawsuit, filed in March against Ms Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, her former campaign manager, the ex-MI6 agent who compiled a dossier of allegations regarding his relationship with the Russian government, and a multitude of other figures connected to the FBI investigation led by ex-special counsel Robert Mueller. He alleged they had all played a part in an “unthinkable plot” by “maliciously” conspiring to “weave a false narrative that [Mr Trump] was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty”.

The former president accused Ms Clinton and her co-defendants of having used “opposition research” to “nefariously … sway the public’s trust” against Mr Trump and asked a court to award damages in excess of $24m, which he claimed to be the total amount of his legal bills amassed during the long-running Mueller investigation.

But in a motion to dismiss filed on Thursday, the 21 co-defendants asked for the case to be thrown out with prejudice — meaning it could not be re-filed — because each of Mr Trump’s claims is “hopelessly stale” and each “fails on the merits in multiple independent respects”.

“Whatever the utility of Plaintiff’s amended complaint as a fundraising tool, a press release, or a list of political grievances, it has no merit as a lawsuit,” they said.

They also explained that the “gravamen” of Mr Trump’s claims concerns events allegedly occurred in 2015, 2016, and 2016, which puts them long past the five-year statute of limitations during which he could have filed suit. Noting a series of tweets from Mr Trump which referenced the events in question, they said he waited “four years, four months and twenty-four days before filing suit”.

“His delay renders each of those claims untimely,” they added.