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“While the caption to the motion includes the word ‘urgency’ and the attached proposed order requests an ‘expedited’ injunction, neither the motion nor the proposed order indicates whether the plaintiffs are asking the court to act. faster or why, ”Pamela Pepper, chief justice of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, wrote in an order issued Wednesday. “As indicated, the motion does not require a hearing. It does not offer an information calendar. “
Yet despite the flaws in his legal efforts, Powell’s mythology has gained ground with a slice of the MAGA orbit, well-known Trump allies like former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, a Powell client who last week won a presidential pardon, to hundreds of attendees at a Wednesday rally Powell and his fellow Trump lawyer, Lin Wood, held in Georgia. They have solicited donations and urged Republicans to deny their votes to GOP senators engaged in the January run-off in the state, saying they were not supporting Trump enough, which both senators support.
The call sparked concern among Republicans trying to defend their majority in the Senate. But Trump himself gives some oxygen to some of Powell’s theories, alluding to them in a 45-minute speech he posted online later Wednesday. Trump claimed the votes were exchanged by voting machines – a debunked conspiracy theory that is at the center of the Powell case.
Powell and Wood allege a massive conspiracy in which states’ electronic voting systems were manipulated by a company linked to late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. What sets them apart from Trump’s official legal team, which has presented similar unsubstantiated fraud allegations, is their willingness to accuse sitting Republican officials of committing crimes to aid the government. election of Biden.
“We will give all of our evidence to the Justice Department as soon as we get it together,” Powell said at the rally. “I wish I could say I had no worries about how it would be handled, but unfortunately I still do. Powell did not respond to a series of questions about deficiencies in his legal documents sent shortly before the rally.
Federal and state officials called the allegations absurd and devoid of concrete evidence. Georgia election officials pleaded with Republicans across the country to speak out against these baseless claims. On Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr became the latest to dismiss the idea that evidence of widespread fraud was uncovered.
“There was an assertion which would be systemic fraud and which would be the assertion that the machines were programmed primarily to distort election results,” Barr said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier in the report. week. “And DHS and DOJ have looked into this, and so far we haven’t seen anything to back it up.
The lack of evidence matches the generally slapdash nature of Powell’s legal maneuvers.
At least twice, Powell has sued on behalf of a party who has not agreed to be part of the case. In a filing in Wisconsin, Powell included Derrick Van Orden, a Republican candidate who narrowly lost to Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), As a plaintiff. But Van Orden said he had nothing to do with the prosecution in a statement on Twitter.
“I learned through social media today that my name had been included in a lawsuit without my permission,” he said. tweeted Tuesday. “To be clear, I am not involved in the lawsuit to overturn the election in Wisconsin.” Van Orden, who could not be reached by POLITICO, told the AP he spoke with someone in Powell’s office about the case but did not give permission to be added to it , and he tried to call her to ask for her name to be deleted but couldn’t get through.
It was the second time Powell had done this. In a lawsuit in Georgia, she listed Cobb County Republican Party Chairman Jason Shepherd as a plaintiff, acting on behalf of the local party. Shepherd first issued a statement saying she had done it preventively and without his final approval, although Shepherd and the county party then agreed to stay on the suit.
Meanwhile, in a Michigan suit, Powell included a “statement” [sic] a so-called cybersecurity expert, Navid Keshavarz-Nia, who runs into a popular conspiracy theory – Hammer and Scorecard – alleging that the vote tally has been hacked.
Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who Trump sacked for declaring the election secure, called it particular conspiracy theory “absurdity.” But in his statement, Keshavarz-Nia alleges an unlikely voting pattern pattern in “Edison County, MI” that supports his theory.
The only problem: no county of that name exists in Michigan.
In the Wisconsin lawsuit which wrongly included Van Orden as a plaintiff, the lawsuit asks a judge to order the “immediate production of 48 hours of security camera footage of all exhibits used in the voting process in the TCF Center. ” But the TCF Center is not in Wisconsin. He is located in Detroit and has been at the center of other election-related conspiracy theories.
Another Powell memoir in the Wisconsin affair mistakenly attributes Biden’s margin of victory in the state to Georgia, writing “Biden was declared winner of the Georgia general election for president by a difference of 20. 585 votes. ” The memory also mixes the two states at one time.
“The defendants failed to administer the November 3, 2020 election in the manner prescribed by the Georgian legislature,” read the memorandum targeting the Wisconsin election officials who are accused in the case. “This conduct violated the applicants’ equal protection and due process rights as well as their rights under Wisconsin law.”
A lawsuit brought by Wood, an associate of Powell, made a similar mistake. A lawsuit he filed in Georgia included an affidavit from Russell James Ramsland Jr., who represented himself as a security expert. But, while alleging some type of fraud in Michigan, he instead included towns in Minnesota, which was first noticed by the conservative Powerline blog. In Powell’s Michigan case, she calls Ramsland an “expert witness,” with a new affidavit that includes cities that are in fact in Michigan.
Powell also misrepresented government documents. The Georgia lawsuit alleges that “a Secretary of State’s certificate was issued to Dominion Voting Systems but is not dated”, attaching a copy of the certificate.
The reality is more prosaic. As Reuters first reported, the secretariat certificate is both dated and publicly available online.
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