A federal judge took Team Kraken to the woodshed in a Zoom hearing on Monday over their misuse of judicial process to undermine Joe Biden’s November 2020 presidential victory on loser Donald Trump’s behalf. I didn’t catch it all, but what I did see was priceless:
U.S. District Judge Linda V. Parker said she would rule on a request to discipline the lawyers in coming weeks. But over and over again during the more than five-hour hearing, she pointedly pressed the lawyers involved — including Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — to explain what steps they had taken to ensure their court filings in the case filed last year had been accurate. She appeared astonished by many of their answers.
While their suit aimed to create a broad impression that the vote in Michigan — and specifically Detroit’s Wayne County — had been troubled, the affidavits filed to support those claims included obvious errors, speculation and basic misunderstandings of how elections are generally conducted in the state, Parker said.
“There’s a duty that counsel has that when you’re submitting a sworn statement . . . that you have reviewed it, that you had done some minimal due diligence,” she said.
The groups efforts were part of a national strategy of challenging certified election results in state after state that Trump lost last November. Trump and his supporters claimed, “We have so much evidence” supporting “widespread, nationwide voter fraud.” What they had was less than vaporware.
If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials. But she could also go further — assessing additional monetary penalties or recommending grievance proceedings be opened that could result in banning the attorneys from practicing in Michigan or disbarring them altogether.
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One of the first substantial repercussions came last month, when a committee of judges in New York state suspended the law license of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as Trump’s personal attorney. The committee found that Giuliani had “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large” in violation of his ethical obligations as an attorney.
Giuliani, Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell are being sued in a 1.3 billion series of defamation suits brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion accuses the trio of a “viral disinformation campaign” alleging the company’s machines flipped Trump votes to Biden.
The judge noted that one observer stated in an affidavit that she believed she saw election workers switching votes from Trump to Biden. Parker asked whether any of the lawyers had spoken to the witness and inquired what exactly she saw that led her to believe that votes had been switched. She was greeted with silence.
“Anyone?” she asked again.
When no one answered a second time, she said: “Let the record reflect that no one made that inquiry, which was central to [the] allegation.”
She focused on another statement from a witness who swore he saw individuals placing clear plastic bags into a mail truck — and said he believed the bags “could be ballots” headed for Detroit’s counting facility.
The judge called that allegation “really fantastical” and “speculative.”
“I don’t think I’ve really ever seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps,” she said. “My question to counsel here is, how could any of you as officers of the court present this type of an affidavit?”
Julia Haller, one of the lawyers who filed the original suit, responded that the statement accurately reflected what the man believed he had seen and that the affidavits should be viewed collectively as suggesting a “pattern of fraud.”
“The very fact that we filed 960 affidavits with our complaint shows extraordinary due diligence on our part,” Powell said.
Powell claims to possess nearly a thousand affidavits from people who saw something they thought meant something about which they knew nothing. That is, what the Krakens lacked in quality, they tried to make up with quantity.
Parker told Powell flatly that volume does not imply legitimacy.
DavidFink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit, told the judge Monday that the lawsuit had helped undermine faith in the election and helped lead directly to the Jan. 6 attack. “We can’t undo what happened, but this court can do something to let the world know that attorneys in this country are not free to use our courts to tell lies,” he said.
Forbes adds:
Powell and Wood spread baseless conspiracy theories in the wake of the election and alleged widespread fraud, leading even the Trump Administration and campaign to distance themselves from Powell and helping fringe theories about election fraud to gain steam on the far right. The Michigan lawsuit is one of four battleground lawsuits Powell filed—all of which failed, including at the U.S. Supreme Court—and Wood also brought his own failed lawsuit in Georgia. In addition to the Michigan sanctions decision, Powell is also facing sanctions and attorneys fees in Wisconsin and a separate effort by Michigan officials to have her disbarred, as well as two defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. Wood is now under investigation from the State Bar of Georgia over his post-election conduct, which could result in him being disbarred.
This entire disinformation campaign has been a fantastical web of lies.
The reason the country is in such as state of decay now is that for decades we as a country have refused to hold a certain class of scoundrel accountable for their crimes and destructive public mischief. Judge Parker has a chance to turn that around, at least outside Washington, D.C. New York’s legal hammer is descending on the Trump crime family. More needs doing inside the Beltway. Perhaps if Parker leads the way, others there might grow a spine.