Government

Detroit Flays Kraken Lawyers In Newest Sanctions Filing

Lying to the court is bad now? Who knew?

By  
on

Do not come into the City of Detroit and start shit, because you will live to regret it.

Team Kraken is learning that lesson the hard way in its bid to avoid sanctions from US District Judge Linda Parker. After a disastrous hearing on July 12 in which the court demanded to know how so many facially bogus affidavits wound up attached to the nonsensical complaint, the parties returned to their respective corners to file briefs explaining why the plaintiffs’ lawyers should or should not be sanctioned.

Sidney Powell, Howard Kleinhendler, and several of the lesser Krakheads stuck to their story that an attorney bears no responsibility for determining the truth or falsity of evidence presented to the court.

While this Court questioned the believability of a handful of factual affidavits, the Rule 11 inquiry does not turn on guesses about the truthfulness of an affidavit executed by an affiant whose credibility has not been vetted through the adversary process. On the contrary, in the Sixth Circuit, “the test for the imposition of Rule 11 sanctions is whether the individual attorney’s conduct was reasonable under the circumstances.”

They also assert that the City failed to appropriately serve them with notification of its intent to seek sanctions, a line of reasoning echoed by Stefanie Lambert Junttila, who has the most to lose here, since she actually practices law in the state of Michigan.

Lambert Junttila mostly concentrated on arguing that the First Amendment gives attorneys the right to file any fool lawsuit they want and telling Judge Parker that the court’s interpretation of its authority under Rule 11 was totally defective. Which is … a choice.

Lin Wood, continued to insist that the court has no authority of him because all he did was sign the brief, and he never sought admission. He also claimed not to have received notice of the City’s motion for sanctions, only learning about it from “news reports.”

Sponsored

Unfortunately for Wood, Detroit’s lawyers managed to get ahold of his tweets, even after Twitter booted him, so they can conclusively establish that Wood knew about the motion from December 15, the day they claim to have served him. 

It’s pretty hard to say you’ve got nothing to do with a case when you’re simultaneously bragging that your advocacy is pissing off all the right people, so you must be “over the target.”

Indeed, the City’s entire motion is a study in outrage and incredulity, as in court earlier this month when Detroit’s lawyer David Fink seemed barely able to contain himself at the bad faith antics on display.

“In a shocking abuse of this Court’s processes, nine lawyers used their privileges as members of the bar to spread dangerous lies that undermined the credibility of the 2020 presidential election and threatened to prevent our nation’s peaceful transition of power,” it began. “It is now time to hold every one of them accountable.”

“There is no excuse for the reckless disregard for the truth that permeated this lawsuit,” argued Detroit, before listing some of the many, many false allegations presented as true in the course of the case.

Sponsored

This is not a case of subtle misunderstandings. Reasonable minds cannot differ about whether Michigan has party registration, whether Michigan voters can vote absentee without using the mail, whether the Antrim County tabulation error was discovered by a hand recount, whether there was a 139% turnout in Detroit, whether “Spyder” is a military intelligence expert, or whether it was evidence of fraud that Joe Biden received a greater share of the absentee ballot vote than Donald Trump.

The City also points to the brazen effrontery of litigating in a jurisdiction without seeking admission, then claiming the court has no authority over you because you never sought admission.

In a particularly hilarious subsection captioned “These Attorneys Ignored Michigan Election Law and Procedures and Support Their Claims With Internet Memes Rather Than Rigorous Legal Analysis,” the brief inveighs against the plaintiffs’ repeated invocation of US v. Throckmorton, a 143-year-old case whose holding contains the memorable phrase “fraud vitiates everything.”

In fact, the Supreme Court in Throckmorton refused to undo a disputed land grant despite evidence that a prior judgement affirming it might have been obtained by fraud. Nevertheless, the wingnutosphere has seized on the language as evidence that courts have inherent authority to undo election results. And the attorneys in this case, who bloody well ought to know better, went along with it, even going so far as to cite Throckmorton in that shitshow hearing.

That Throckmorton has made the leap from uninformed social media commentary to citation by Plaintiffs’ counsel as the legal basis for this far-reaching and unfounded lawsuit demonstrates that this suit has been driven by partisan political posturing, entirely disconnected from the law. This lawsuit is the dangerous product of an online feedback loop, with these attorneys citing “legal precedent” derived not from a serious analysis of case law, but from the rantings of conspiracy theorists sharing amateur analysis and legal fantasy in their social media echo chamber.

Fink et al. were particularly incensed that the plaintiffs’ attorneys claim not to have been served when documents were sent to the addresses supplied in their signature blocks and to publicly available emails — although the lawyers helpfully failed to include their email addresses when they were docketing motions. You know, after they promised to seek admission to the jurisdiction and didn’t.

“There are no words to describe how detached these lawyers are from the basic rules of professional responsibility, civility and ethical legal representation,” reads the concluding paragraph. “They must not be given the opportunity to further abuse our judicial system and to undermine our democracy.”

And as someone who has followed the Kraken clusterfuck from the beginning, may I say AMEN TO THAT.

King v. Whitmer, Docket [Court Listener]

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

Topics

,