ATL: ‘Mike Lindell Back At SCOTUS For Another Ritual Pantsing’ His ‘LOLsuit’ Is A ‘Cowpie’ They Say

One thing I will say for Mike Lindell: He’s going to enable an actor, who is yet unborn, to win an Oscar in a movie that will be made about all this madness long after most of us are dead. A lot of Watergate movies and mini-series have come out (outstanding ones, I might add) in the past eight years of Trump, because Watergate is the closest to this debacle that we live in now, in all of our history. I was saying to a young friend in college a few years ago, “My life is bookended by insane Republican administrations. I was in college studying journalism and film when Watergate occurred and now I’m an old woman blogging in the era of Trump. I couldn’t imagine it could get worse than Nixon. I was wrong. Remember this conversation for when you’re my age, fifty years from now, and the GOP manages to bottom Trump. Assuming America is still having elections, and is a democracy, which is not guaranteed.”

The Cliff’s Notes version of this 52-page waste of pixels and server space that Lindell filed electronically today is that Kari Lake and Mark Finchem (then-candidates for Governor and Secretary of State of Arizona) are still trying to outlaw Arizona’s voting machines. Lindell is underwriting the lawsuit and two conspiracy theorist lawyers are bleeding him dry.

“Nothing new,” he [Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer] told me on Friday. “Same old crazy. Zero percent chance the United States Supreme Court decides to spend its very limited time on something so crazy that it got sanctioned to the tune of $100,000-plus at the trial court level.”

And that’s a main tenet of the lawsuit, a complaint that the lawyers got sanctioned.

Put another way, a conspiracy must be more than a figment of your imagination — or a marketing scheme to sell sheets — if you want the courts to take you seriously.

Here are a few key excerpts. Here’s the entire opus if you want to read it.

“While this breach has the game-changing magnitude of the Allies’ deciphering Germany’s ENIGMA machine in World War II, it is far worse,” the appeal says. “Dominion leaves the decryption keys bare, in plain text.

“Embedded Dominion employees or any malicious actor who knows where to look can gain total access and control over an election. It is like a bank telling the public they have the most secure vault in the world, and then taping the combination on the wall next to the vault door.”

“Even worse, key logging features that would record system activity showing such control can also be manipulated or disabled, thereby rendering any penetration of this system nearly undetectable.”

I don’t know whether this is ENIGMA-level spy stuff that’ll shock the world. Or whether it’s even true. They appear to offer no backup to support their claim in the 210 pages filed with the Supreme Court

What I do know is that this appeal still doesn’t offer any evidence that Dominion’s machines – the ones various independent experts have confirmed were not connected to the internet — were hacked.

The only thing getting hacked is Lindell’s bank account. But election denialism is his drug of choice, so he’s only too happy to spend every dollar he’s got on it. It gets him high, I guess.

Above The Law has a comically scathing analysis of Lindell’s suit, which it charitably refers to as a “cow pie” and an “LOLsuit.”

Here at ATL, we have devoted many pixels to this Lindell-subsidized LOLsuit thanks to the involvement of one Alan M. Dershowitz, who managed to get himself sanctioned along with the rest of the lawyers involved in this ridiculous exercise. Judge John Tuchi was unmoved by Dersh’s plea that he was simply “of counsel” and/or too old and sick to be sanctioned. The court was also unpersuaded by the professor’s offer to draft a law review article explaining why sanctions should not apply. […]

The case was filed in spring of 2022 in Arizona by gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, who purported to be seeking a judicial order mandating that the state use paper ballots for the upcoming election. In reality Arizona has done exactly that for years, and they’ve now wandered off to make a pointless argument about standing.

In his dismissal, Judge Tuchi noted that this would have been immediately apparent had the plaintiffs’ counsel bothered to conduct “the factual and legal pre-filing inquiry that the circumstances of this case reasonably permitted and required.” The trial court imposed sanctions on the lawyers, and the 9th Circuit has shown no interest in sticking their noses in this particular cow pie.

But fear not, kids, because Mike Lindell is bringin’ it to SCOTUS (again!) with a petition for certiorari that will make elections great again.

The part I loved is when allusion was made to another voting nightmare and SCOTUS intervention, namely Bush v. Gore. The argument is that the Supreme Court inadvertently made it too difficult to mount election challenges by restricting both standing and the window for relief. They are obsessed with standing, Lindell’s lawyers.

Institutional inertia from having intervened in the 2000 election should not sideline this Court’s review of new systemic flaws in our elections. Indeed, the Court’s recent decisions have created a “Goldilocks problem’” that only this Court can resolve. On the too-cold side, Lance v. Coffman, 549 U.S. 437 (2007), has come to stand for the proposition voters cannot assert claims under the Elections and Electors Clauses. On the too-hot side, Purcell v. Gonzalez, 549 U.S. 1 (2006), posits that election-law challenges brought by candidates—once the candidates are known—come too close to elections. Cases are never “just right” for voters or candidates to challenge the wholesale bombardment of States’ election-integrity laws or practices that decide close elections.

The article goes on to say, “That is a very generous interpretation of SCOTUS’s use of Purcell, but perhaps the justices will be more open to Lake’s proposed solution, which is that they should engage in a massive power grab and rewrite state election laws wholesale.” This is the part which is comical or tragic, depending upon your vantage point and what side of Lindell’s checkbook you’re on. The law simply does not work this way. But these two lawyers are happy to play these frivolous games if it lines their pockets.

First, the Court should summarily reverse here, while limiting Lance to its actual holding.

Second, as part of implementing Moore v. Harper, 143 S.Ct. 2065 (2023), the Court should commit to taking on an error-correcting role for justiciability in election challenges, at least until lower courts understand what Article III covers and what it does not cover.

“You can never go wrong telling the Roberts court to arrogate power to itself, right?” the author asks.

The article concludes that the SCOTUS filing “did give Lindell another vehicle to fundraise, so let’s call it a win.” So do as Mike Lindell suggested you do, call all your friends, get them together, and give them a copy of the Writ of Certiorari along with a set of percale sheets. Sweet Jesus. And send your money to Mike. He needs it more than you do.