Hillary Clinton scored a decisive legal victory Wednesday as a federal appellate court dismantled, piece by piece, President Donald Trump’s sprawling lawsuit accusing her of orchestrating a conspiracy to rig the 2016 election against him. The ruling not only upheld the dismissal of the case against Clinton and every other defendant, but also affirmed nearly $1 million in sanctions against Trump and his attorney Alina Habba — a blistering reprimand for what the court described as a bad-faith misuse of the legal system.

For Clinton, long the centerpiece of Trump’s political mythology and the figure he has repeatedly blamed for investigations into his campaign, the decision marks another unmistakable judicial rebuke of those claims. The 36-page opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit leaves no room for ambiguity: the lawsuit was meritless from the start.

“Many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” the three-judge panel wrote, echoing the district court judge who initially described the 193-page amended complaint as a mess of “hyperbole,” score-settling, and “shotgun pleading.” It was, in effect, the legal equivalent of a political rant — and one that the courts have now rejected at every turn.

Trump’s lawsuit, filed in 2022, accused Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, former FBI Director James Comey, and more than two dozen others of participating in a vast conspiracy to discredit him during the 2016 race. But after the district court tossed the suit, the appeals court agreed that Trump had failed to articulate any viable claim. Eleven of the sixteen claims weren’t even appealed — an omission the judges noted pointedly — and the five that remained were found to be “untimely and otherwise meritless.”

Notably, the panel — which includes appointees of George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Trump himself — appeared openly skeptical of the filing. In a hearing last week, Chief Judge William Pryor asked Trump’s lawyer whether he could even dispute that the complaint was a textbook shotgun pleading. He could not.

Trump’s attempt to revive the case by citing Special Counsel John Durham’s report also failed. The court said the report added nothing new that would alter the legal calculus. The existence of an investigation had already been acknowledged in the original filings; Durham’s conclusions did nothing to resuscitate claims that were defective on their face.

Beyond affirming Clinton’s victory, the court upheld the hefty sanctions the district court imposed on Trump and Habba for abusing the judicial system. The lower court determined the lawsuit was filed in bad faith, peppered with false assertions and legal theories that had no grounding in law. The resulting $937,989.39 fee award — jointly and severally assessed against Trump, Habba, and her firm — stands as one of the largest sanctions ever levied against a former president.

The only sliver of relief the appellate judges offered Trump had nothing to do with Clinton. The case against one defendant, Orbis Business Intelligence — the firm linked to former British spy Christopher Steele — was dismissed without prejudice due to a jurisdictional issue. But that narrow procedural footnote does nothing to change the broader picture: Hillary Clinton remains fully vindicated in the eyes of the courts, and Trump’s attempt to weaponize a lawsuit against her has collapsed completely.