Thread by @AkivaMCohen

We now have access to the Complaint and request for TRO the President filed against Georgia on Thursday. Will do a thread but it's loooong so this'll take time, as I have work-work to do as well

I really really hope this isn't what they construct this complaint around. "some people voted illegally" is true in every election (see the multiple fraudulent votes for Trump in PA, for example), and this doesn't get you to "they admit the election was unreliable"

This particular statement referred to Sterling catching the woman he'd bought his home from 2 years ago registering to vote absentee and using it as the address. Story here cbs46.com/news/election-…

Oh

"Your Honor, we asserted all of these claims in a different court, where we lost, and which you don't have appellate jurisdiction over" is NOT, generally speaking, a successful litigation strategy.

In case you were wondering

It's *especially* not a winning litigation strategy where you say "look, we think we've identified all these issues, but they have better data than we do and we're not sure if these are really real issues"

Laches laches laches, laches laches laches.

Laches, laches ...

I mean, this is a nice try and all, but ... no. "They believe that what they are doing is fully compliant with Georgia law" is NOT a thing that lets you wait 9 months, and after 2 elections (Georgia held its primary under these rules in June, 3 months after signing) to challenge

"We couldn't know whether they were actually doing the they said they were going to do, and bound themselves to do by a settlement agreement, until after everyone had voted" is a stupid argument in the best of circumstances.

It's a *doubly* stupid argument when signature checks

are done when the absentee ballot application is received - i.e. months before the election - and when the ballot is received (anywhere from months to weeks to days in advance) and Election Day has no particular bearing on "when the conduct happened"

But it's a triply stupid argument when there was an actual primary election in June at which these processes were followed.

So ... no, you didn't need to wait until November 3 to know it was happening. You didn't need to wait for any election day. But even if you did, you had one in June!

This argument doesn't have even the slightest chance of flying, and they know it

Also ... let's take a look at that "Settlement Contract" and see if it says what Paragraph 14 claims, and in what context

Holy shit

This can't possibly be what they're referring to, can it?

For those who don't understand it, that's a standard "we're settling without admitting wrongdoing" clause ("State defendants don't concede the challenged laws are unconstutional" = "just because we're settling doesn't mean we think you would have won")

OMG, yes, that's it. That's the entirety of any reference to constitutionality in the settlement agreement; read the whole thing for yourself here

courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

Words can't express how bad it is to file THAT claim in a federal court document. There's no conceivable good faith basis for it; no attorney could have misread it. Every time I think the bar has dropped as far as it can possibly go, I underestimate their ability to keep digging

Also, they continue to confuse the "absentee ballot rejection rate" (absentee ballots rejected for any reason at all) with the "signature match" rejection rate (absentee ballots rejected due to signature mismatch)

Not that it matters. The entire point of the settlement was to reduce the number of absentee voters rejected due to signature mismatch by making sure that mismatches were actual mismatches, and not just one person screwing up the comparison.

That's not a problem under GA law

They're back on their "State Farm Arena" nonsense, but note the difference between the nonsense Trump was spewing on the call ("these were fake ballots, run multiple times, by an evil fraudster") and the much narrower claim by his lawyers in court ("this violated observer rules")

They're also leaning pretty hard into "your Honor, we already litigated all of these claims in a different court, where we lost

Oh, this is nuts on a level I can't even begin to imagine

Here's how they are dealing with the fact that this is their (at least) second case raising these issues: They are arguing that the state court assigned an "ineligible judge" and they really needed an "Administrative Law Judge" - this is bonkers

You CANNOT ask a federal judge to rule that state court judicial assignments were incorrect. This isn't a federal question and federal courts don't supervise state courts. That's not at all how any of this works

This next section is just extraordinary. Your Honor, we continually shot ourselves in the foot through our own dicks by making dumbshit procedural moves, so now it's an emergency

Let's recap. You waited until 12/4 - a month after the election - to bring your challenge. You felt you needed an ALJ, so you asked for one in your Petition as part of your request for relief, but didn't file any motion asking the court to actually assign one.

Folks, judges DO NOT read complaints or petitions when they are filed, and they DO NOT just up and act on the "requests for relief". If you want something, you need to actually ask the court for it by a motion, not just put it in your "here's what we want if we win" section

They wanted to have an administrative law judge assigned. That's NOT a standard thing, so they needed to ask for it by a motion. They didn't. So they got a regular judge, who, on 12/9, issued what I assume is a relatively standard case-opening scheduling order

That shocked you band of clowns into action, so on 12/10 you made an emergency motion for the appointment of an ALJ. THE NEXT DAY you band of fuckwits filed an Emergency Petition to Cert to the Georgia Supreme Court, appealing <checks notes, dies> a fucking SCHEDULING ORDER??

You thought you'd be able to skip from the trial court to the Georgia Supreme Court on an appeal from a scheduling order?!

The GA Supreme Court, which only reviews cases that have been completed, took all of 1 day to say "LOL, no, you don't get to appeal this to us. Idiots."

But it turns out that when you file a notice of appeal, you strip the trial court of jurisdiction to do anything. So even though the trial judge ALSO issued a scheduling order on 12/11 setting a response time on your request to appoint an ALJ, your attempt to appeal stayed that

And KEPT it stayed for over 2 weeks, because you didn't do anything about it until, on 12/29, the court very politely tapped you on the head with an order that said "hey, brain geniuses, I can't do anything until I have jurisdiction again"

So on 12/29, you finally filed a notice withdrawing your notice of appeal, and asked, again for an ALJ to be appointed.

Amazing

They took a procedural issue that could've been resolved in early December, and by a combination of "just not asking" and then "filing stupid appeals" delayed it through January. Idiots.

I suppose "extraordinary steps" is one way to describe all that, yes

This is another falsehood. Georgia certified its election results on November 20, 2020, weeks before Trump filed his challenge. apnews.com/article/georgi…

It *recertified* on December 7, after completing the recount Trump requested. But it had already been certified before then

Coffee County had a total of 15,214 votes, of which 69.5% went to TRUMP. You could delete every Biden vote in the county and Biden would still win the state.

"A county where I had a net gain of 6K votes said it couldn't recertify, therefore I didn't lose the election and the GA legislature gets to pick me" is one hell of a ballsy argument

Yeah ... that's not the way this works. "Our self-delayed election contest is still pending so there are no lawfully certified results from the state" is not the way the law works (for obvious reasons)

Yes, Trump has an obvious and personal interest in "who the electors vote for". But it's NOT "as President" - it's as a candidate

This, however, is a huge problem for the President's claim of standing. Georgia already appointed electors, who already voted and whose votes are already transmitted. "Decertifying the election" will not make those people "not electors" or their votes vanish

You're expressly arguing that the Court should issue an injunction so that other people NOT party to the case (Congress/the GA Legislature) MIGHT take subsequent action that you want. That's a redressability problem

Especially since the GA legislature only reconvenes on 1/11, AFTER the electoral count day, so it can't "appoint new electors" even if it wanted to.

I'm unclear on why they didn't include the GA legislature as a defendant and ask for an order directing the governor to call the legislature into session and the legislature to appoint electors by vote before 1/6; they'd still lose on the merits but at least they'd be asking for

relief that could potentially fix their claimed injury. "Decertify the election" is no longer enough to do that.

On to the substance, which is a rehash of old debunked allegations, now sprinkled with "and the Georgia state courts are being mean to us by not treating our dick-foot-shooting as the brilliant litigation legerdemain they should be".

This is their entire "we're totally likely to succeed on the merits this time" section

They then lightly touch on the other injunction factors and move on to a declaratory judgment request. Here are the substantive counts of the complaint, and all but the final request for relief

And the finish

Before you ask: NO, YOU SHOULD NOT BE WORRIED ABOUT THIS CASE

They've also got a brief in support of their injunction motion, but I've got client work that needs doing. Hopefully @questauthority has you covered

Update (cc @questauthority ) The court has ordered opposition briefing to be filed by 9:00 pm today and a zoom hearing tomorrow at 9:30 am courtlistener.com/docket/2891728…