NEW YORK — The Democratic Party sued Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks and Trump’s son and son-in-law Friday, accusing them of an intricate conspiracy to undercut Democrats in the 2016 election by stealing tens of thousands of emails and documents.
The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court seeks unspecified damages and an order to prevent further interference with computer systems of the Democratic National Committee.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement. He called it an “act of unprecedented treachery.”
The Democrats accuse Trump and his associates of trading on pre-existing relationships with Russian oligarchs tied to President Vladimir Putin and working with them to undermine Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The president has said repeatedly there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. On Friday, his campaign scorned the lawsuit as “frivolous” and said it would be quickly dismissed.
“This is a sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional and nearly insolvent Democratic Party,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said.
The Democrats’ lawsuit doesn’t reveal new details in the sprawling storyline of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives working on behalf of the Kremlin.
Instead it knits many of the threads that have emerged in public over the past two years to paint a picture of an alleged conspiracy between the Trump campaign, the Kremlin and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The DNC says the “brazen attack on American democracy” began with a cyberattack on DNC computers and phone systems in 2015, allowing the extraction of tens of thousands of documents and emails. WikiLeaks then blasted out many of the documents on July 22, 2016, shortly before Clinton was to be nominated — upsetting the Democrats’ national convention.
That added up to a “campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” the DNC lawyers write in the lawsuit.