Government

Kraken Lawyer Siccing Private Investigator On Michigan Election Clerks

These people will never go away!

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A Kraken lawyer has dispatched a private investigator to accompany a Michigan sheriff’s deputy on secret interrogations of election clerks about the 2020 election.

Just … WTF?

Bridge Michigan reports that Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf has sent private investigator Michael Lynch out accompanied by a sheriff’s department employee to harass election workers about the 2020 election.

Leaf previously made news by suggesting that the plot to kidnap and execute Governor Gretchen Whitmer was perhaps just a plan to carry out a totally legal (huh?) citizens’ arrest. He worked with the Kraken legal team in an effort to seize the voting machines in Barry County (pop. 61,157), where Trump took 65 percent of the vote. And he filed one of the more amazingly ridiculous election suits of the season, attempting to halt election certification based on warmed over “Sharpiegate” allegations from Arizona.

Denying Leaf’s request for a restraining order, Chief U.S. District Judge Robert J. Jonker said the application “contain[ed] only introductory comments, a section regarding subject matter jurisdiction, a section on the parties, and then proceeds straight to an analysis of Rule 65 and a request for relief. The Applications are not verified either.”

He went on:

Plaintiffs’ Applications invite the Court to make speculative leaps towards a hazy and nebulous inference that there has been numerous instances of election fraud and that Defendants are destroying the evidence. There is simply nothing of record to infer as much, much less conclude that irreparable injury will occur before the defendants can be heard.

Finally, the Applications do not satisfy the Court that Rule 65’s notice certification requirement has been met. Plaintiffs state they made a “reasonable effort” to serve the Applications via email to counsel representing the Defendants in a separate action currently pending in the Eastern District of Michigan. But a “reasonable effort” does not notice make.

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Three guesses which Kraken Krackerjack filed this POS suit on Leaf’s behalf.

Hint: It’s the same one who put her name on that insane brief insisting that an e-signature didn’t count as actually appearing in the case.

That’s right, it’s Stephanie Lambert Junttila, most recently seen in these pages getting castigated at last week’s Kraken sanctions hearing for failing to cite any cases in support of her argument that the First Amendment allows lawyers to say absolutely any insane bullshit in the course of zealous client representation.

Previous FOIA requests show Leaf cahootsing with Junttila and other members of the Kraken Krew via his attorney Carson Tucker. And so it’s perhaps no surprise that Junttila hooked Leaf up with a civilian investigator to participate in this wildly inappropriate fishing expedition in the company of a law enforcement official, so as to give it the apparent coercive endorsement of state imprimatur.

“I was told by my clerks that they were told not to say anything to each other or to me,” Barry County Clerk Pam Palmer, a Republican, told Bridge. “So I don’t know what (Leaf and his team) are trying to hide. I’m told by the investigator that they’re doing this under the element of surprise.”

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There’s a lot that’s unclear here, including who is paying Lynch to interrogate these county employees as apparent state actors and what Junttila’s role is in the scheme. But it certainly appears that she’s communicating on Lynch’s behalf.

Leaf has refused to disclose an initial complaint that he said prompted the investigation. The local media has quoted Leaf as saying his office is not paying Lynch, the private investigator who is working with his office and has questioned local government officials alongside a sheriff’s deputy.

In a brief phone interview Thursday, Lynch told Bridge Michigan he is “part of” the Barry County probe but declined to say who hired him. He said he was about to have a meeting and would call back. He has not.

Instead, Junttila responded by email to a separate Bridge inquiry, describing Lynch as a “certified fraud examiner” and “licensed investigator” who “was previously employed at DTE for 40 years with 20 years spent serving as the director of security.”

“Michael Lynch has not been paid to investigate election fraud in Barry County,” Junttila wrote.

She did not respond to follow-up questions, including whether Lynch is being paid to investigate anything else. Lynch did not answer a phone call on Friday and did not respond to questions via text message, telling Bridge Michigan that “Ms. Lambert (Junttila) sent you a response.”

Diiiiiiiiiiiirty.

It’s always the ones you most suspect, right?

Michigan sheriff enlists private eye to grill clerks in vote fraud probe [Bridge Michigan]

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

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