Trump suit against Clinton part of longtime legal strategy

NEW YORK (AP) — When a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic panned Donald Trump's plans for a new Manhattan skyscraper, Trump responded by suing. When the tenants of a building he was trying to clear sued to halt their evictions, Trump slapped back by filing suit against the law firm representing the tenants. And when an author said the former president was worth far less than he'd claimed, Trump again took legal action.

So when Trump last week filed a sprawling suit accusing his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party of conspiring to sink his winning presidential campaign by alleging ties to Russia — renewing one of his longest-standing perceived affronts — it wasn't a surprise.

Trump has spent decades repurposing political and personal grievances into causes of legal action. Throughout his business and political career, he has used the courts as a venue to air his complaints and as a tool to intimidate adversaries, sully their reputations and try to garner media attention.

“It’s part of his pattern of using the law to punish his enemies, as a weapon, as something it was never intended to be,” said James D. Zirin, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the author of the book “Plaintiff in Chief,” which details Trump’s legal history. “For him, litigation was a way of life.”

Trump’s latest lawsuit revisits a familiar grievance: that Democrats in 2016 concocted fictitious claims that his campaign was colluding with Russia and that the FBI as a result pursued an “unfounded” investigation.

The 108-page suit, as much a political screed as a legal document, names as defendants longstanding targets of his ire from both the political realm — Clinton and her aides — and the law enforcement community, including former FBI Director James Comey and Peter...