The Courts Should Make Short Shrift Of These Vexatious Lawsuits (Updated)

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Update to Trump’s Sore Loser Ticket Of Election Deniers File Election Challenges.

Scheduling hearings have been held in two of the three election challenges filed by Trump’s ticket of election deniers. This should be over by Christmas.

The Arizona Mirror reports, Legal experts: Kari Lake’s lawsuit to overturn the election is ‘poorly written,’ lacking details and evidence:

Kari Lake’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2022 election and re-do voting will be swiftly thrown out because the claims it makes aren’t supported by any evidence and are overly generic, according to legal experts.

“It is poorly written, frankly,” Jim Barton, a Democratic election attorney and partner at Barton Mendez Soto in Tempe, told the Arizona Mirror. “It’s so long and meandering. I think the underlying claims are terrible and the lawsuit is terrible and it’s, frankly, embarrassing that this kind of thing can get filed.”

He said the lawsuit fails to make a specific claim and ought to be dismissed outright.

“It does not even come close to providing the level of specificity that you need to file a lawsuit,” he said.

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1602825609012707328?cxt=HHwWgIDQ4cbZsL4sAAAA

Barton, a veteran election attorney whose clients have included candidates and ballot campaigns, added that lawsuits challenging election results must address specific issues and “have to be tightly created.”

“Airing generic grievances does not work in this context,” he said.

* * *

“I don’t think this case will go very far and will probably be dismissed pretty quickly,” Derek Muller, a professor of law at the University of Iowa College of Law, told the Mirror. “She lost by a significant margin. There are very few specific details. There are lots of details that are trying to relitigate the 2020 election. I was a little surprised at how much was just restating things from 2020. There’s just not a great path forward based on the speculative kinds of claims that are being made in this complaint.”

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1603027389629566978?cxt=HHwWhMC8wd26jL8sAAAA

[M]uller added that he believes it’s telling that Lake’s attorneys aren’t experienced election lawyers like those who generally back Republican Party interests in court. Representing her in the suit are Scottsdale divorce attorney Bryan Blehm, who was hired by the failed firm Cyber Ninjas in the so-called ”audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, and D.C. corporate and employment attorney Kurt Olsen, a Trumpist lawyer who filed a failed bid to toss out the results of battleground states that Donald Trump lost in 2020.

* * *

“We saw similar kinds of rhetorical posturing in the lawsuits trying to overturn the 2020 election results,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said in an email. “Unfortunately, it’s become a common tactic among election deniers. Fortunately, it hasn’t been a successful one. And I suspect Lake’s lawsuit is heading for a similar fate as all of the 2020 election cases — not succeeding.”

Brahm Resnik from 12 News ads:

Like her patron Donald Trump, she maintains – without evidence – that the midterm election was stolen.
Lake’s 70-page complaint alleges “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected the election in Maricopa County.”

The allegations contained in the complaint rely in part on “data analysts” connected to the We the People Alliance.

The Phoenix-area organization has received $180,000 in funding from Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne, according to campaign finance records with the Secretary of State’s Office. Lindell and Byrne are two of the leading promoters of the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen.

Her allies have set up a new organization – the Save Arizona Fund – to help pay her legal bills. [A grift, just like Donny did.]

The Kari Lake War Room on Twitter and Sen. Wendy Rogers on social media caused a disruption of the scheduling hearing on Tuesday.

The Arizona Mirror reports, Hobbs, Maricopa County will ask a judge to dismiss Kari Lake’s bid to overturn her election loss:

The defendants in Kari Lake’s lawsuit seeking to overturn her loss in the midterm election plan to ask for the case to be dismissed, they told a Maricopa County Superior Court judge Tuesday morning.

Those defendants include Secretary of State and Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, as well as the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.

They have until noon Thursday [December 15] to file their motions to dismiss, while Lake’s team has until noon Saturday [December 17] to respond. 

[M]aricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson set oral arguments on those motions to dismiss for Monday, December 19 and tentatively scheduled evidentiary hearings for Dec. 20 and 21 — assuming the case isn’t dismissed first. 

“The secretary does believe that the court will be able to dispose of this case in its entirety on motions to dismiss without the need for an evidentiary hearing,” Andy Gaona, an attorney for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, said during the hearing.

One of Lake’s lawyers, Scottsdale divorce attorney Bryan Blehm, who was hired by the failed firm Cyber Ninjas in the so-called ”audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, attempted to defer to his co-counsel Kurt Olsen to answer a scheduling question during Tuesday’s hearing. But Olsen, a Trumpist lawyer from Washington D.C. who specializes in corporate and employment law, had not yet filled out the application to work on this case in Arizona, where he isn’t licensed to practice law.

Then Blehm argued with the judge over whether some voting registration records that had been provided as evidence should be sealed from public view to protect voter information. The county had asked the judge to seal them to protect voters from theft of their information.

Blehm had accidentally provided copies that were not redacted, but after replacing them with redacted versions, he told the judge that shielding them from public view was not necessary.

Thompson explained that he couldn’t strike the original files from the record due to public records law, but could seal them from public view.

“We think these are exhibits that the public needs to see,” Blehm said. “The public needs to be aware of how Maricopa County is conducting its elections, your honor, and that’s our position.” [Crowd sourcing election conspiracies.]

Thompson went on to clarify that the voter records would still be available to the court and the litigants, just not the public.

“I can either err on the side of caution and grant the request (to seal the records) or take your word for it, Mr. Blehm, that there’s no harm, no foul, and leave it out there,” Thompson said. “I’m going to err on the side of caution and protect the information so that the voter information is not disclosed, however it is fully part of this case and can be used by the parties and their counsel.”

Right-wing personalities and media shared the attorneys-only link, flooding the virtual hearing with interlopers and their screaming children

So many people joined a virtual meeting meant only for litigants in Kari Lake’s election challenge that the hearing was delayed for 30 minutes while the court tried desperately to get them to log off.

At one point, more than 360 people logged into the Maricopa County Superior Court hearing Tuesday morning after Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers and conservative website the Gateway Pundit both publicly sharedthe meeting link for the first hearing.

Typically, when the court holds a virtual hearing, plaintiffs, defendants and the judge participate via Microsoft Teams, while the court provides a separate livestream link for public view.

But the Teams link was included in an order the judge issued Monday informing the litigants of Tuesday’s hearing. And after state Sen. Wendy Rogers tweeted the Teams link, so many members of the public joined the meeting that the lawyers litigating the case couldn’t get into the meeting.

Beginning more than 30 minutes prior to the scheduled start of the hearing at 11 a.m., the court repeatedly asked those who were not litigants to leave the meeting and to watch the livestream instead, but its requests were mostly ignored.

“I was just told this is the most popular meeting in America right now,” Lake tweeted after the hearing was set to begin. “I can’t even get INTO the meeting, nor can my attorneys.”

Many of the rogue attendees left their microphones on, so the court and those watching the livestream could hear children yelling and someone watching cartoons, as well as coughs and sneezes.

After around 30 minutes of unsuccessfully trying to get members of the public to log off, the court opened a new Teams meeting for the hearing with a link that was not shared publicly.

Once the hearing finally began, the public livestream was beset by technical problems, constantly buffering and crashing, because of the large number of people watching it.

Judge Peter Thompson said at the end of the hearing that he didn’t know how the Teams link had been distributed so widely, but asked those listening to please share the livestream link in the future so that members of the public have access to the hearings but don’t crowd out the lawyers and other necessary participants in the hearing from the meeting.

The second scheduling hearing was in Mark Finchem’s election challenge. The Arizona Mirror reports, Finchem’s election challenge moves forward, GOP senator seeks to overturn the Maricopa County election (excerpt):

A lawsuit filed by Mark Finchem last week seeking to overturn his election loss in the secretary of state race will move forward without failed Republican congressional candidate Jeff Zink after an amended complaint was filed this week.

The lawsuit includes no evidence that ballot tabulators malfunctioned anywhere in Arizona — the issues in Maricopa County were caused by malfunctioning ballot printers — or that voters were disenfranchised. The new amended lawsuit filed earlier this week removes Zink, who lost his election to Gallego, a Democratic congressman, by more than 50 percentage points.

Finchem wants his election loss to Fontes overturned, a statewide hand-recount of all ballots and a court order that the attorney general investigate Hobbs for self-dealing and threatening public officials.

Finchem, a Republican lawmaker from Oro Valley, is represented by Daniel McCauley, a Cave Creek attorney who specializes in trusts and wills, not election law. McCauley earlier this month was hired by the Cochise County board of supervisors to defend its decision not to certify election results by the deadline in state law, but he failed to show up to a court hearing. A judge ultimately ordered the county to certify its election.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Julian on Tuesday ordered attorneys representing Hobbs and Fontes to have their motions to dismiss filed by the end of the day [Tuesday December 14] so McCauley could adequately respond to them. She set aside time for oral arguments Friday [December 16] morning, and said an evidentiary hearing on the case could be possible next week if the case is not dismissed.

“The claims that are raised by the plaintiff are baseless. They are sanctionable,” [under Rule 11] Andy Gaona, an attorney representing Hobbs, said during the hearing. Earlier this month, attorneys representing former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake were sanctioned for false claims they made in a lawsuit that aimed to bar voting machines in the state.

Gaona said in court Tuesday that he was confident that the case would be dismissed, but added that a Friday hearing could be complicated due to another case in Mohave County he’d have to be attending, though he said he believed it would be over quickly.

[In a fourth election challenge], state Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu, filed an election contest in Mohave County Superior Court on behalf of himself and John and Jane Doe defendants contesting the results of the election in Maricopa County.

Borrelli’s suit is largely based on a false claim made by Attorney General Mark Brnovich [aka “Nunchucks”] that the county uses “artificial intelligence” to verify the signatures on ballots.

Brnovich made the claim while appearing on former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s podcast in April. While computers are used to assist in the signature verification process, there is no “artificial intelligence” and humans verify every early ballot signature.

Borrelli has a long history of making false claims about election fraud. He was a driving force behind the state Senate’s so-called “audit” of the 2020 election, and he has participated in a number of QAnon related events [with Rep. Mark Finchem, Rep. Leo Biasiucci, and Sen. Wendy Rogers, GOP legislators spoke at a QAnon convention chock full of conspiracies and hate.]

“It is set for an hour but I don’t think it will last that long,” Gaona said of the hearing in Mohave that could conflict with the motion to dismiss hearing in the Finchem case.

The third election challenge filed by GQP attorney general nominee Abe Hamadeh apparently has not yet had a scheduling hearing.

UPDATE: The Arizona Republic reports, What’s next for Abe Hamadeh’s attorney general election challenge? Judge sets schedule:

Oral arguments for Republican attorney general candidate’s Abe Hamadeh election contest are scheduled for Monday [December 19] afternoon.

Mohave Superior Court Judge Lee F. Jantzen set the schedule in a hearing Wednesday. Dan Barr, an attorney for Mayes, filed a motion to dismiss Hamadeh’s lawsuit Tuesday. If the judge does not take that action after the Dec. 19 hearing, a trial is scheduled for Dec. 23.

“We expect this to be resolved next week. We expect our motion for dismission to prevail next week. If not next week, we expect to prevail at trial. Abe Hamadeh doesn’t have any facts to supports his allegation,” Barr told The Arizona Republic.




1 thought on “The Courts Should Make Short Shrift Of These Vexatious Lawsuits (Updated)”

  1. “Should” being rhetorical key word here.

    My guess is that the actual goal of these suits is to have the matter decided by the AZ Supreme Court, and any Court with the likes of Bill Montgomery and Clint Bolick on it worries me.

    They give partisan hacks a bad name.

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