Government

Giuliani Leaks Into Third Circuit, Releases Kraken, Congratulates Himself On Flawless Victory After District Court Smackdown

So much winning!

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(Photo by Rob Kim/Getty)

Pour one out for the Elite Strike Force Team of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Since Rudy Giuliani’s leaky press conference on Thursday, attorney Sidney Powell has been demoted to freelance conspiracy flogger, reduced to crowdsourcing her campaign for justice using the hashtag “KrakenOnSteroids.”

A lot has happened with the Trump campaign’s attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania in the past 48 hours — and all of it soul-crushingly stupid.

On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann issued a withering smackdown of the Trump campaign’s legal stylings in an order denying the motion to amend their complaint and dismissing the case with prejudice due to lack of standing and failure to state a legally cognizable cause of action.

“This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote, adding a few paragraphs later, “That Plaintiffs are trying to mix-and-match claims to bypass contrary precedent is not lost on the Court. The Court will thus analyze Plaintiffs’ claims as if they had been raised properly and asserted as one whole for purposes of standing and the merits.”

Which is hardly a ringing endorsement of the quality of lawyering by Team Trump.

The court cited Third Circuit precedent for the plaintiffs’ lack of standing based on a theory of vote dilution, demolished the campaign’s claims to competitive or associational standing, particularly based on the Marks v. Stinson case Guiliani keeps waving around as if it’s the Magna Carta, described the remedy sought as unconstitutional, rejected the Equal Protection claims because the Trump and Biden campaigns had equal access to the canvass, and characterized the requested delay to amend the complaint as something close to dilatory.

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Naturally, the Trump campaign reacted jubilantly, congratulating themselves for graduating to the Third Circuit in record time.

“Today’s decision turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the U.S. Supreme Court,” they announced, characterizing the decision by Judge Brann, a longtime Republican and Federalist Society alum as “just an extension of the Big Tech, Big Media, Corrupt Democrat censorship of damning facts the American public needs to know.”

Then Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis made fun of Frank Luntz’s penis on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/JennaEllisEsq/status/1330346436760903682?s=20

So gravitas! Very officer of the court!

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Indeed, the Trump Brain Trust did file a motion for expedited review on Sunday evening. In fact, they filed two, after several hours of getting mercilessly hammered on Twitter by every competent appellate lawyer for failing to appeal the district court’s substantive holding and basing the appeal “solely on the basis of undue delay after dismissing Appellants’ Amended Complaint with prejudice.”

In a midnight mulligan, the Trump campaign clarified that it may still appeal those issues, just as soon as it finishes wowing the trial judge with its Second Amended Complaint.

Further, Plaintiffs believe that the Second Amended Complaint cures any deficiencies noted by the District Court regarding, inter alia, standing, equal protection, and remedy because its allegations are very different than those in the Amended Complaint. Plaintiffs have specifically pled claims based on this Court’s decision in Marks v. Stinson. However, to be clear, Plaintiffs do not intend to waive any claim that any part of the District Court’s decision may have been wrongly decided, including, inter alia, the District Court’s denial of Appellants’ claim for standing and Equal Protection, and can provide supplemental briefing on any such issues if the Court requests.

Marks v. Stinson, DRINK!

There’s also some bizarro language about there being no “case or controversy” over the district court’s dismissal order.

According to the Secret Rudy Decoder Ring we found in a box of Froot Loops, this means that the entire dismissal is a nullity because the judge failed to take into account their magical Second Amended Complaint that would explain how Trump really won Pennsylvania’s election despite losing by 80,000 votes. Never mind that the Second Amended Complaint does not exist for the purpose of the federal docket, since Judge Brann refused to allow further amendments. It exists in Rudy’s mind, and thus the court must take due notice of its brilliance.

And speaking of things that exist only in someone’s fevered imagination, check out Sidney Powell’s appearance on Newsmax this weekend wherein she accused Georgia’s Republican governor of getting paid to steal the election from Donald Trump, perhaps with the connivance of the CIA.

Alrighty then. 

Shortly after this bravura performance, the Trump campaign released the Kraken … from her association with the Trump campaign.

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and Ellis wrote of their erstwhile sidekick.

In her own statement, Powell agreed that she “never signed a retainer agreement or sent the President or the campaign a bill for my expenses or fees,” but vowed to fight on.

“We are proceeding to prepare our lawsuit and plan to file it this week. It will be epic,” she promised, without specifying exactly how she’d get standing to sue the “communists from without and within” or the “foreign actors in Hong Kong, Iran, Venezuela, or Serbia, for example, who have neither regard for human life nor the people who are the engine of this exceptional country.”

“You may assist this effort by making a non tax-deductible contribution to www.DefendingTheRepublic.org. #KrakenOnSteroids” she concluded.

And even as we type, the Third Circuit clerk has duly accepted the appellants’ proposed briefing schedule, so this afternoon will bring us yet another legal filing by the Trump campaign. Very kind of the president to sponsor the #AppellateTwitter virtual happy hour. Again.

The brief is due at 4, so have your cocktails ready.

[All case documents courtesy of Democracy Docket]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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