Kraken Down!
The lawyers behind the "Kraken" lawsuit in Michigan have been sanctioned and ordered to pay the costs of the other side and also ordered to take classes on election law. The full 110 page opinion is linked.
It's not news for attorneys either retained by Trump directly or purportedly working on his behalf on the election fraud issue to be sanctioned for unethical or unprofessional conduct. Giuliani lost his law license for repeatedly making provably false statements about the election, and attorneys in Colorado were sanctioned in part for being either willfully or recklessly credulous regarding the "evidence" they forwarded to the court (click the link to see examples). This case is a combination of both.
The attorneys alleging election fraud in this case submitted hundreds of pages of affidavits, supposedly as evidence, but neglected to display basic skepticism and neglected to conduct corroborating investigations into the claim. For example, Melissa Carone (the same person who appeared to be intoxicated at a hearing in front of the Michigan House) claimed in her affidavit (pg 73):
There was two vans that pulled into the garage of the counting room, one on day shift and one on night shift. These vans were apparently bringing food into the building . . . . I never saw any food coming out of these vans, coincidently it was announced on the news that Michigan had discovered over 100,000 more ballots—not even two hours after the last van left.
Seeing a two vans pull into a garage and then speculating that they were used to bring in 100,000 fraudulent Biden ballots is a big leap. The attorneys who submitted her affidavit credulously called this event an "illegal vote dump" based on just the above information, and did not seem interested in filling in the speculation jumps.
They also submitted another affidavit by Articia Bomer, based on similar conjecture and speculation (pg 77):
I observed a station where election workers were working on scanned ballots that had issues that needed to be manually corrected. I believe some of these workers were changing votes that had been cast for Donald Trump and other Republican candidates.
There's no explanation for the foundation of this belief, and the attorneys who submitted this affidavit never bothered investigating it further. During the last hearing on this case the judge asked all the attorneys if anyone asked Bomer whether she actually saw someone change a vote, they just stayed silent.
There's also the affidavit by Ramsland who was making claims that some voting precincts had increased voter turnout of up to 700% from the year prior. It later turned out that Ramsland erroneously used data from Minnesota to calculate data for Michigan (I saw some speculation that he may have been confused by the 'MI' state abbreviation). Ideally, the attorneys should have responded with "wait, are you sure that's right?" when receiving claims that voter turn-out has increased by 700%, and some basic fact-checking would have revealed the 'MI' error. But they didn't.
The same thing happened with the 'Spyder' affidavit, who supposedly came from a "US Military Intelligence expert". Because the affidavit was not properly redacted, his identity was revealed and journalists quickly found out he was not an intelligence analyst as they originally claimed he was. One of the attorneys, Kleinhendler, nevertheless defendended the Spyder affidavit as credible by citing his years of experience in cyber security and apparently a confidential informant working for the US Government (Kleinhendler doesn't explain where this information came from, or why it wasn't included in the first place). The revelations about Spyder's identity happened fairly early on, including a Washington Post article on Dec 11, 2020, yet Kleinhendler claimed that he didn't find out about any of this discrepancy about his own expert that he himself submitted to a court until Jan 14, 2021. The judge didn't believe him.
Which gets into the question as to why the attorneys alleging election fraud did not investigate the evidence that they submitted to a court. The judge states on pg 101:
Once it appeared that their preferred political candidate’s grasp on the presidency was slipping away, Plaintiffs’ counsel helped mold the predetermined narrative about election fraud by lodging this federal lawsuit based on evidence that they actively refused to investigate or question with the requisite level of professional skepticism—and this refusal was to ensure that the evidence conformed with the predetermined narrative.
I agree with this explanation. The efforts that the attorneys in question took to apparently blind themselves of the severe deficiencies in the affidavits they submitted was not insignificant. You would think that any attorney who files a lawsuit would be especially keen to know if any of their claims or evidence is falling apart, but in this case they appeared to willfully remain ignorant about those deficiencies. Why?
The last time I talked about this hobby horse of mine, I asked why there were so many blatant examples of apparent incompetence among attorneys alleging election fraud. One of the explanations offered was that Trump was highly unpopular among the professional class, which includes lawyers. And despite his decades as a New York real estate billionaire, the legal profession essentially boycotted him (either willfully or out of fear of reprisal) and he was unable to secure competent legal talent. His claims of election fraud, unfortunately, withered on the vine because of that.
Let's assume that's true. What I see above doesn't fit the mold of inadvertently bad lawyering, and there's actually a good way to compare by just looking at litigants representing themselves (common in family law, small claims, and longshot criminal appeals). Another good comparison is the Vic Mignogna defamation saga (highly recommended ALAB episode), where an otherwise competent trusts and estate attorney found himself hopelessly out of his depth pursuing a defamation lawsuit, apparently motivated by the lure of publicity. Lawyering is not actually that difficult, and incompetence is generally evinced through sloppy legal citations and arguments rather than actively failing to properly vet your own evidence. Even the dumbest of my clients know they can't win by just ignoring the weaknesses in their case.
What's presented above doesn't look like accidental incompetence and the Spyder affidavit is the best illustration of this. The attorneys here cannot be said to have been lacking resources, and that's evidenced by just how many experts and witnesses they managed to solicit, in addition to the millions in donations fueling the enterprise. It's implausible to claim that the attorneys could not have known that Spyder was not actually a military intelligence analyst. Rather, the best explanation is they didn't want to know. Even after multiple journalists uncovered his background through some very basic investigations (such as calling a US Army spokesperson, imagine that), the attorneys appear to actively avoid acknowledging that information, and kept insisting they were in the dark about that more than a month later. This doesn't happen just by chance, it seems clear that their blindness was willfully enacted.
The conclusion that I think is supported by the evidence above and in other cases is as follows: The lawyers knew there was no evidence of fraud, as any basic examination of the affidavits they themselves submitted would have revealed. But their ultimate goal was to create enough generalized suspicion that could then be leveraged into political pressure. There are many examples of this type of backchannel political pressure. This includes Trump calling the Georgia SoS and saying "I just want to find 11,780 votes" by citing "internal" parts of Dominion machines being removed, and Trump's Chief of Staff asking DoJ officials to issue a press release about election fraud, citing the Italian satellite theory. The lawsuits were filed to give the claims a patina of legitimacy through judicial imprimatur. This all explains why so many of the claims, including ones stated or boosted by Trump himself, were so flagrantly insane. If enough people believe it (and a decent portion of Trump's base was likely to, given how much was demonstrably susceptible to QAnon theories), then whether or not the claims were actually true wouldn't matter in the end. The goal is to gallop from one claim to the next and ride whatever theory had legs within the base, no matter how unmoored from reality it may be. Politicians necessarily have to give their electorate what they want regardless of why they want it.