Cease & Desist Letters Are RICO And Other Complete Nonsense Alan Dershowitz Is Peddling Now

The conspiracy was sending C&Ds to people saying not to defame them and then *nefariously* suing the people who actually did defame them.

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Most people get apprehensive when they receive a cease-and-desist letter written by a fancy law firm and making all sorts of vague threats of potential legal action. Formal letters from big entities can be scary!

Lawyers, on the other hand, realize that 90 percent of cease-and-desist letters are unactionable garbage slapped together to placate clients looking for an expensive home for their outrage. A nice $10K piece of paper that says, “I’m mad, but my lawyers tell me there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.” Is there something unfair about deep-pocketed entities spamming their antagonists — real or imagined — threatening legal action? Maybe… but it’s also substantively harmless. Because, by definition, a cease-and-desist letter does not initiate any legal action.

But the Dersh has decided to throw his rapidly disintegrating reputation behind a new purported class action alleging that cease-and-desist letters sent by Dominion Voting Systems to “Stop the Steal” morons amounted to racketeering because when Alan Dershowitz isn’t living in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, he’s living in a the haze of a MyPillow infomercial.

From ye olde Daily Beast:

In a complaint reviewed on Friday, eight poll challengers allege that cease and desist letters sent to them by Dominion as part of the company’s defamation lawsuit harmed and damaged the recipients. They allege that Dominion is violating the civil provision of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, engaged in a civil conspiracy, and deprived the litigants of their constitutional rights under the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Didn’t RICO jump the shark about the same time the phrase “jump the shark” jumped the shark? I thought we’d all come to an agreement that a RICO claim that doesn’t involve the words “Gambino Family” is just a red flag that your lawsuit is a joke.

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MAGA lawyer/troll Kurt Olsen heard from the recipients of these letters and decided that they’ve had their feelings hurt by these scary letters — none of which led to any legal action, mind you — so he’s going to haul the federal court system into this on behalf of legally unsophisticated snowflakes everywhere. As he puts it, Dominion is embroiled in “Lawsuit Warfare” which he terms “Lawfare” (undoubtedly to the shock of Ben Wittes… maybe he should send them a cease-and-desist letter!) with his clients, even though, again, the plaintiffs have not been named in any lawsuit until Olsen dragged them into this one.

This would seem to be a laughable dog of a lawsuit, but Dershowitz has lost the healthy sense of professional shame that keeps most law professors on the right side of embarrassing lawsuits. On Friday, he told an interviewer that while he’s not in contact with Olsen — despite signing his name to the suit right below Olsen’s — he is consulting on the First Amendment issues.

How does this even remotely reach a First Amendment issue?

So not only have these Americans received Letters from a corporate citizen with tens of millions in annual revenue and private equity support, but they have also been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.

In effect, they have not. But this is the galaxy brain Dershowitz theory that because local governments purchase Dominion’s equipment, Dominion is therefore a state actor and not a private company because the state is “delegating” its constitutional obligation to conduct an election to Dominion once it buys Dominion’s products. Meaning its cease-and-desist letters are comparable to the cops coming to your home and telling you to stop criticizing the government.

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This is, of course, absolute guano of a legal theory. Under Dershowitz’s logic it’s constitutionally protected to defame Lockheed Martin by pointing out that it uses child sex slaves trapped in the Pizzagate restaurant to build the F-35. Which is entirely untrue, though it would explain why the multi-trillion dollar project has produced a flying Ford Pinto. But Dersh’s theory would reason that because that kind of libel would criticize a private company for selling something to the government in furtherance of its constitutional duties — in this case national defense — they would be unable to act upon it.

And that’s not necessarily the dumbest thing in the suit because the whole thing involves overlooking one giant misconception that the complaint flogs for over 70 pages.

[Dominion] threatened [plaintiffs with] ruinous “imminent” litigation—even if the recipients of the letters did not make any public statements about Dominion.

Except the letter doesn’t say that.

So, if you were betting the over/under, we’ve reached “naked fact distortion” here in paragraph 4. Because the letters — one of which they reproduce in the complaint literally TWO PAGES LATER — actually tells the recipient to not participate in the ongoing defamation of Dominion and says that litigation is imminent against Sidney Powell. If the plaintiffs read this as Dominion imminently threatening to sue them, then they may have bigger problems than chilled free speech… like reading comprehension.

At best, this served as notice that a lawsuit may arise if their involvement with people like Powell rose to the level of reproducing defamatory statements which is not an act of intimidation but a textbook example of the proper use of a cease-and-desist letter.

Yet this is what undergirds the whole complaint:

Those Letters threaten the recipients with ruinous litigation unless the recipients recant unspecified statements and cease further public expression regarding election integrity and security or evidence of fraud related to the 2020 Presidential Election in certain jurisdictions. These threats constitute extortion, witness intimidation, witness retaliation, witness tampering, and mail fraud for purposes of establishing the requisite “predicate acts” for a civil RICO claim.

No, they don’t. The letters threaten recipients with ruinous litigation if they make actionable defamatory statements. If they don’t make defamatory statements literally nothing will happen to them, which is less a threat than a civics lesson. There might be a claim here if instead of cease-and-desist letters, Dominion blanket-sued a bunch of people and then systematically voluntarily dismissed those suits after people were run through the wringer of actually answering the complaints.

Except Clare Locke — unlike Olsen and Dershowitz — actually knows how the law works, so they didn’t do any of that.

Dershowitz, ‘Stop the Steal’ Lawyer Team Up for New Dominion Lawsuit [Daily Beast]


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.