I LOVE this lawyer's response to the lunacy of the stupidest lawsuit ever filed by Republicans!!!
“I know that might sound surprising given how much time we’ve spent talking about the Electoral College, but that’s the literal truth. The Electoral College isn’t actually a thing that exists. It’s a process. This is like being hit by a hurricane and trying to sue ‘the wind,’”
As she asked the U.S. Supreme Court this month to overturn President Trump’s election loss, the attorney Sidney Powell cited testimony from a secret witness presented as a former intelligence contractor with insights on a foreign conspiracy to subvert democracy.
Powell told courts that the witness is an expert who could show that overseas corporations helped shift votes to President-elect Joe Biden. The witness’s identity must be concealed from the public, Powell has said, to protect her “reputation, professional career and personal safety.”
The Washington Post identified the witness by determining that portions of her affidavit match, sometimes verbatim, a blog post that the pro-Trump podcaster Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman published in November 2019. In an interview, Maras-Lindeman confirmed that she wrote the affidavit and said she viewed it as her contribution to a fight against the theft of the election.
“This is everybody’s duty,” she said. “It’s just not fair.”
In a recent civil fraud case, attorneys for the state of North Dakota said that Maras-Lindeman falsely claimed to be a medical doctor and to have both a PhD and an MBA. They said she used multiple aliases and social security numbers and created exaggerated online résumés as part of what they called “a persistent effort . . . to deceive others.”
Powell’s reliance on Maras-Lindeman’s testimony may raise further questions about her judgment and the strength of her arguments at a time when she is becoming an increasingly influential adviser to the president. Trump’s legal team distanced itself from Powell last month after she falsely claimed Republican state officials took bribes to rig the election. But she has visited the White House three times in the past week, once to participate in an Oval Office meeting. Trump has weighed naming Powell a special counsel to investigate the election, according to previous reports.
Maras-Lindeman, 42, served in the Navy for less than a year more than two decades ago and has said she worked later as a government contractor and part-time interpreter. She has identified herself as a “trained cryptolinguist.”
North Dakota’s assertions about her credentials came in a civil case brought by the state’s attorney general in 2018 over a purported charitable event she tried to organize in Minot, N.D., where she and her family resided. Attorneys for the state said she used money she collected — ostensibly to fund homeless shelters and wreaths for veterans’ graves — on purchases for herself at McDonald’s, QVC and elsewhere.
A judge ultimately found that Maras-Lindeman violated consumer protection laws by, among other things, misspending money she raised and soliciting donations while misrepresenting her experience and education. He ordered her to pay more than $25,000.
Good catch, canpakes. This is what I've been saying about Sidney: she deliberately chose a strategy that would let her talk about her "evidence" without every having it tested.
That's incredible! By that theory, once any party gains control of the Whitehouse, the current vice president could decide to set a precedent that could insure that no president of the opposing party would ever again be able to become president. That it is even possible for any idiot to interpret the Electoral College provision of the Constitution in such a way as to justify such an eventuality is an overwhelmingly powerful justification to amend the Constitution to once and for all to excise that horrendous error from it!
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
I'm wondering if Trump will be signing contracts with the Daleks and Cybermen for their help in his retaining power on a permanent basis. In return, the Cybermen will be able to dump their ion tailings in Alabama and the Daleks will get free Netflix and HBO Max.
And the response of the main plaintiff, Representative Louie Gohmert, is in effect to call for violence on the streets ... happy days!
A US judge has rejected a lawsuit from a Republican congressman that sought to allow vice president Mike Pence to reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden when Congress meets on Wednesday to certify his victory over president Donald Trump.
The latest long-shot attempt by Trump’s Republican allies to overturn the November election result was dismissed by one of Trump’s own appointees to the federal bench, Jeremy Kernodle.
He ruled that representative Louie Gohmert of Texas and a slate of Republican electors from Arizona could not show they suffered any personal harm “fairly traceable” to Pence’s allegedly unlawful conduct and, therefore, lacked legal standing to bring the case.
The standing requirement “helps enforce the limited role of federal courts in our constitutional system. The problem for plaintiffs here is that they lack standing,” Kernodle wrote.
A spokesman for Trump referred questions to Pence’s office. A spokesman for Pence declined to comment.
Gohmert and his fellow plaintiffs said they would appeal. In an interview with the broadcaster Newsmax, the congressman said the ruling was “an example of when the institutions that our constitution created to resolve disputes so that you didn’t have to have riots and violence in the streets, it’s when they go wrong.”
“All this stuff about it [election fraud] being debunked, unsubstantiated, those are absolute lies,” he said, without evidence. “Basically in effect the ruling would be that you got to go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM [Black Lives Matter].”
Trump has refused to concede defeat and has repeatedly falsely claimed the election was tainted by widespread fraud. He and his allies have lost dozens of court efforts seeking to reverse the election results.
Biden beat Trump by a 306-232 margin in the electoral college and is set to be sworn in on 20 January.
Under the electoral college system, electoral votes are allotted to states and the District of Columbia based on their congressional representation.
Some Republicans have said they plan to object to the count of presidential electors next week in Congress. The effort could trigger a lengthy debate in the Senate but has virtually no chance of overturning the results.
A justice department lawyer representing Pence on Thursday had urged Kernodle to dismiss the lawsuit, saying they had sued the wrong person because they raised “a host of weighty legal issues about the manner in which the electoral votes for president are to be counted”.
“The Senate and the House, not the vice president, have legal interests that are sufficiently adverse to plaintiffs to ground a case or controversy,” Pence’s filing said.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Mayan Elephant:
Not only have I denounced the Big Lie, I have denounced the Big lie big lie.
Here's an assessment of Trump's latest GA lawsuit. This is beyond embarrassing for the legal profession. Trump filed an election contest, handled it incompetently for weeks so that it went nowhere, and now wants the federal court, which has already rejected suits by Lin Wood and Crazy Kraken Lady, to bail him out. Not only that, he filed it on Thursday with a motion for a hearing on short notice, but didn't follow the local court procedures for filing emergency motions. (Lead counsel is from Georgia.)
The constitutional arguments are beyond stupid. The legal system is beyond out of patience with this Doofus.
I love this bit from RI’s link (READ THE WHOLE THING - IT’S SUBLIME):
They wanted to have an administrative law judge assigned. That's NOT a standard thing, so they needed to ask for it by a motion. They didn't. So they got a regular judge, who, on 12/9, issued what I assume is a relatively standard case-opening scheduling order.
That shocked you band of clowns into action, so on 12/10 you made an emergency motion for the appointment of an ALJ. THE NEXT DAY you band of fuckwits filed an Emergency Petition to Cert to the Georgia Supreme Court, appealing <checks notes, dies> a damned SCHEDULING ORDER??
You thought you'd be able to skip from the trial court to the Georgia Supreme Court on an appeal from a scheduling order?!
The GA Supreme Court, which only reviews cases that have been completed, took all of 1 day to say "LOL, no, you don't get to appeal this to us. Idiots."
By that theory, once any party gains control of the Whitehouse, the current vice president could decide to set a precedent that could insure that no president of the opposing party would ever again be able to become president. That it is even possible for any idiot to interpret the Electoral College provision of the Constitution in such a way as to justify such an eventuality is an overwhelmingly powerful justification to amend the Constitution to once and for all to excise that horrendous error from it!
