Lawyer Files Document “Under Plenty of Perjury”
Typos happen, but rarely are they this marvelous.
That's especially because this isn't just any lawyer, it's a member of the utterly hapless Trump legal team, although team" probably isn't the right word there, and I don't think legal" is entirely accurate, either. L. Lin Wood, Jr., is a Georgia lawyer who specializes in defamation lawsuits. He's probably competent enough in those kinds of lawsuits, but his efforts on behalf of Trump, like the efforts of his compadre Sidney Powell, have repeatedly and embarrassingly failed. I personally think that people like Wood and Powell are probably the Orly Taitzes of the ongoing election challenges," but time will tell whether they are willing to fail as often and as publicly as she did.
Wood has acted as the plaintiff in at least some of these lawsuits, and he's doing so again here. The challenges to the presidential election having failed, he's now starting up on the Georgia runoff elections for the U.S. Senate. Of course, at least one federal judge in Georgia, where this lawsuit was also filed, has already held that Wood doesn't have personal standing to bring these kinds of claims. I don't know why this case would be any different, but maybe he'll shock and amaze us this time.
Like Powell, Giuliani, Ellis, and the other members of the Trump squad, Wood has repeatedly made factual claims for which judges have found there is not a scrap of evidence, and he seems to do the same thing here. At least, he devotes several pages in his new complaint to the nonsense about Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic Corporation, the ghost of Hugo Chavez, and so forth. Remarkably, many of these same claims were just debunked by, of all people, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, and Maria Bartiromo. Why would Fox News commentators debunk claims being made by a member of the Trump squad? Well, I can't be sure, but I do know they did it right after Smartmatic dropped a 20-page cease-and-desist letter on Fox threatening it with a defamation lawsuit if they didn't retract the false claims. But maybe that's just a coincidence.
I haven't analyzed the whole complaint, because I don't want to and it'll probably be dismissed before I could finish. But I did notice that in paragraph 68, Wood asserts that To be sure, the use of the Dominion voting machines is known to have manipulated the election results to favor one candidate over another in contravention of the expressed will of the voters." This not only misuses to be sure," which is awful, it uses the passive voice (is known to have manipulated") instead of identifying the person or persons who allegedly know" this. There are some factual allegations along these lines elsewhere in the complaint, but it looks like most if not all of them are recycled from other failed lawsuits in which the Trumpists could provide no evidence to support their claims.
Shouldn't a lawyer who specializes in defamation think twice about putting those same allegations in a verified complaint, which has to be signed under penalty of perjury? Specifically, swearing under oath that all the facts alleged in the complaint are true and correct"? Maybe he did. Maybe his hand trembled as he tried to type the verification. Or perhaps it was a Freudian slip?
I'm sure it was just a typo. But what a glorious typo it was.
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