Really had a hard time picking which part of Judge N. Reid Neureiter’s decision in favor of sanctions against a bunch of no-name MAGA lawyers to use for this article. Every page I’ve skimmed is a laugh at these assholes who sued – and this is a long list – Dominion, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife for whatever fucking reason, each of the Governors and Secretaries of State of Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, plus Wisconsin Governor Toney Evers, and finally all six members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission – individually named since Wisconsin doesn’t have a Secretary of State – in a “class action brought on behalf of all American registered voters, alleging that their constitutional right to vote for President somehow was unconstitutionally infringed on or burdened by the Defendants” on in a Colorado federal court on December 22, 2020.
Tough as a choice it may be, I feel confident that Judge Neureiter’s findings win the day (page 64)
For the reasons stated above, I find the following:
(1) That this lawsuit was filed in bad faith;
(2) That Plaintiffs’ counsel’s legal contention that the Plaintiffs had Article III standing to bring this suit was not warranted by existing law or a nonfrivolous Case argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or establishing new law. To the contrary, I find that Plaintiffs’ counsel’s arguments on the issue of standing frivolous;
(3) That Plaintiffs’ counsel’s act of filing a lawsuit in Colorado against state officials from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin was not warranted by existing law or a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or establishing new law. To the contrary, it was obvious that there was no personal jurisdiction in Colorado over these defendants and suit against these state officials should never have been filed in Colorado;
(4) That, in light of the unusual and highly volatile circumstances of this case and the surrounding political environment, Plaintiffs’ counsel did not conduct a reasonable inquiry into whether the factual contentions had evidentiary support. Without doing any independent confirmation via, for example, the hiring of experts, or speaking to lawyers who had filed other failed lawsuits, they improperly accepted allegations from those suits and from media reports at face value and cut and pasted them into their Complaint and Amended Complaint;
(5) That because of its inherent legal flaws and the inadequate inquiry into the factual allegations by Plaintiffs’ counsel, this lawsuit should never have been filed in the first place or, using the Tenth Circuit’s test, no ‘reasonable attorney admitted to practice before the district court would file such a document’.
(6) That Plaintiffs’ counsel’s filing of a motion for leave to amend, without addressing the obvious fatal problems with standing and lack of personal jurisdiction, while attempting to add RICO claims based on a TIME magazine article that provided no support for such claims, was a violation of 28 U.S.C. § 1927 in that the attempt to amend unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings;
(7) That Plaintiffs’ counsel improperly included in a federal complaint highly disputed and inflammatory statements by the former President stating categorically that ‘DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE’ without doing anything to independently verify the truth of that statement;
The judge the goes on to award attorney’s fees to the defendants but doesn’t mention anything else about further professional sanctions for the MAGA clowns, which is kind of a letdown, but this decision was a joy to behold. 10/10 would skim again.