Government

Georgia Counties Demand Attorneys Fees From Trump In Junk Election Suits

About damn time!

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Before he heads off to Florida, Georgia election officials would like the former president to close out his tab. To wit, they’d like to be compensated for having to show up in court and defend themselves against the raft of garbage suits filed against random state officials in a doomed attempt to overturn the results of the election.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was first to report, lawyers in DeKalb and Cobb Counties asked the Fulton County Superior Court yesterday to order Trump to cough up $6,105 and $10,875 respectively for having wasted their time and money fending off the president’s “meritless and legally deficient petition.” 

As Cobb County’s motion notes, Georgia’s statute governing Contested Elections and Primaries limits the categories of persons who can be sued to the candidate whose nomination or election is contested, the candidate  whose eligibility to seek any nomination or office in a run-off primary or election is contested, the election superintendent or superintendents who conducted the contested primary or election; or the public officer who formally declared the outcome.

Despite the fact that neither Janine Eveler, the Director of the Cobb County Elections Department, nor Erica Hamilton, the Director of Voter Registrations for DeKalb County, falls into any of these categories, they were still named defendants in Trump’s December 4 suit in the Superior Court of Fulton County. And even after the former president amended his complaint on December 9 to add the appropriate county-level defendants, he still didn’t remove Eveler and Hamilton. Nor did he bother to actually serve them until December 28 — which was only two weeks after the Supreme Court of Georgia had bounced his interim appeal of the trial court’s refusal to enjoin certification of the state’s election results.

Cobb County’s motion notes that Georgia law allows the court to award “attorneys’ fees and expenses of litigation in any civil action in any court of record if, upon the motion of any party or the court itself, it finds that an attorney or party brought or defended an action, or any part thereof, that lacked substantial justification or that the action or any part thereof, was interposed for delay or harassment, or if it finds that an attorney or other party unnecessarily expanded the proceeding by other improper conduct[.]”

And in further support of its claim that the petition was defective on its face, the county points out that Georgia law requires election contests to be based on specific illegal ballots cast in numbers sufficient to effect the outcome, not just gobbledygook statistical analyses generated by scholars of highly dubious expertise suggesting that some proportion of the ballots cast must be illegal.

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Trump never did manage to persuade Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” He voluntarily dismissed the case on January 7, the day after the Capitol Riot, citing an “out of court agreement.”  The Secretary of State immediately responded in a press release stating that there was no such agreement: “Rather than presenting their evidence and witnesses to a court and to cross-examination under oath, the Trump campaign wisely decided the smartest course was to dismiss their frivolous cases.”

In the end the entire exercise came to exactly nothing. But the counties still had to hire outside counsel to shepherd them through it. And even at a wildly discounted “government rate,” the counties are still out tens of thousands of dollars.

And your trusty legal bloggers are out millions of brain cells after spending three months reading these nonsense pleadings and praying for a merciful meteor to put us out of our misery. Here’s hoping at least someone gets made whole after this debacle.

Cobb, DeKalb want attorney’s fees for ‘meritless’ Trump lawsuit [AJC]

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

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