Being Held Accountable For Their Incitement, Should Go Beyond Just Paying Court Costs

Opportunists Like Trump, Lake And Finchem Need To Go To Prison

MAGA losers Finchem and Lake

Arizona Republicans under-performed last month. The state has an R+2 PVI but the top races pretty much all went to Democrats. In the crucial Senate election Democrat Mark Kelly beat Blake Masters by 125,719 votes (51.4% to 46.5%). In the gubernatorial race, Katie Hobbs bear MAGA crackpot Kari Lake by 17,117 votes (50.33% to 49.67%). In the attorney general election, Democrat Kris Mayes in leading Abraham Hamadeh too narrowly to call. Just 511 votes separate them and a recount in mandated. But that isn’t so in the very high profile race for secretary of state. Trump picked MAGA state Rep Mark Finchem, a full-blown fascist, to run. And the voters rejected him for a little-known Democrat— and in no uncertain terms:

• Adrian Fontes (D)- 1,320,619 (52.4%)

• Mark Finchem (R)- 1,200,411 (47.6%)

Screaming, every QAnon conspiracy theory in the book, Finchem went to court to demand he be declared the winner or to have the election revoted. Yesterday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Julian dismissed— with prejudice— his lawsuit and now Fontes is filing for legal sanctions based on Finchem’s lawsuit being found utterly frivolous. (By dismissing Finchem’s lawsuit “with prejudice,” it means the case was adjudicated on the merits and he cannot refile the same claim again— in other words, “take a hike,”)

Democracy Docket reported that Finchem’s lawsuit alleged that issues with tabulator machines in Maricopa County and the ‘weak and unsatisfying’ solutions offered to voters resulted in ’60,000 Maricopa County and 20,000 Pima county missing votes reported on the Secretary of State website.’ The contest blamed these issues on current Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), suggesting that she ‘had an ethical duty to recuse herself’ because she ‘was herself running for governor’ while being the state’s chief election officer. According to the plaintiffs, ‘recusal would cause her to lose control of the election she hoped to directly benefit from– a staggering appearance of impropriety and display of unethical behavior,’ causing Arizona to have ‘the only mid-term election in the 50 states with such a comical and tragic outcome.’ The lawsuit contained other outlandish claims such as accusing Hobbs of using Twitter ‘to censor the free speech of Arizona citizens because of “misinformation” [that] offended her political perspective.’ Today’s ruling came after a hearing in which lawyers for Arizona secretary of state-elect Adrian Fontes (D) and Hobbs argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed.”

This lawsuit has been riddled with strife from its conception. On top of Finchem’s claims being rooted in election denialism and conspiracies, his attorney (the same attorney who represented the Cochise County Board of Supervisors and filed in a federal court that does not exist) misspelled Fontes’ name several times and even misspelled his own client’s name as “Fincham” in a response to the defendants’ motions to dismiss the contest. In her motion to dismiss, Hobbs argues that Finchem’s requested relief “is extreme, unfounded, and unavailable.” In Fontes’ motion to dismiss, he writes that “‘[e]nough is enough.’ The People of Arizona have spoken, rejected Plaintiff’s firebrand of divisive and dangerous rhetoric, and elected Adrian Fontes in order to preserve our democracy for future generations.” During today’s hearing, Finchem’s lawyer presented several novel arguments, including that the civil rules should not apply in this case (even though Finchem asked for discovery under the civil rules), Twitter is part of the government and counties have discretion to canvass election results. In the order dismissing the case, the judge writes that Finchem’s arguments “are not well-pled facts; they are legal conclusions masquerading as alleged facts. As such, this court is not obliged to assume their truth.” This ruling finally puts to rest a last-ditch effort by Finchem, who lost by over five points, to overturn valid election results.

Meanwhile, Kari Lake, who has endorsed the My Pillow Guy for RNC chair, is working furiously towards being picked by Trump as his running mate. Writing for the Arizona Republic yesterday, EJ Montini noted that Trump and Lake are nothing more than grifters competing for money from the same suckers. Lake, he wrote “has been relentlessly pitching her false conspiracy theories and the ludicrously frivolous lawsuit she has filed claiming a stolen election, endlessly appearing on right-wing media and now begging online for donations to the Save Arizona Fund, which Lake calls ‘my legal fund.’” Also writing for The Republic yesterday, Laurie Roberts asserted that Lake and Finchem should be forced to reimburse taxpayers for the frivolous lawsuits.

The first one was thrown out by U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi who noted that Lake and Finchem “provided no evidence of a problem and no proof that a hand count of ballots would be more accurate than a machine count. Last week, he ordered sanctions against Lake’s and Finchem’s lawyers, noting that ‘false, misleading, and speculative allegations’ do not equal evidence.” Judges have 4 more MAGA candidates’ lawsuits coming next week. “When they’re done and the lawsuits are inevitably dismissed,” wrote Roberts, “at least a few of those judges should follow Tuchi’s example, allowing taxpayers to recoup of some of the cost of defending against the election tantrums.”

Mark Finchem, Abe Hamadeh and Kari Lake each have filed their own election challenges, offering up a broad array of reasons why judges should throw out the election results. Finchem’s and Lake’s lawsuits, in particular, read more like a pair of Twitter rants than actual lawsuits. Lots of woulda coulda speculation but nothing in the way of anything that approaches actual evidence that would change the vote counts.

Lake claimed, among other things, that there were “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots” in Maricopa County, that “thousands of Republican voters” were disenfranchised, that “tens of thousands” of early ballots with mismatched signatures were counted, that printers were “susceptible to hacking” and that printer failures were “intentional”.

What she didn’t offer was evidence to back up any of that.

"Plaintiff’s 70-page Complaint and its 7,254 pages of exhibits ... give the impression that Plaintiff has a mountain of evidence supporting her extraordinary demands to overturn an election," Maricopa County's lawyer, Karen Hartman-Tellez, wrote in the s lacounty's motion to dismiss filed Thursday. But the factual allegations and exhibits are largely irrelevant to issues properly before the court in an election contest, mostly based onunwarranted speculation, and do not stand up to even the barest of scrutiny."

Lake did offer statements from more than 220 Maricopa County voters who claimed they were harmed by printer problems on Election Day. But of those, 217 voted on Election Day, according to Maricopa County’s motion to dismiss.

“And none of those (three) voters were prevented from casting a ballot by the Defendants, but instead each chose not to vote because the declarant decided that waiting in line or visiting a different polling place was a greater inconvenience than the value they placed on voting that day,” the county wrote.

Even if those three voters had somehow been denied their right to vote, that still would leave Lake 17,114 votes short.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are out hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend against what amounts to a legal temper tantrum.

You bring an utterly baseless lawsuit? You should foot the bill.

Many of us have a tendency to laugh at the stupidity of characters like Lake and Finchem. But the ranting and grifting of these characters can have very serious consequences in real life that go beyond wasting taxpayer money on frivolous lawsuits. The January 6 insurrection was the most obvious example. And it goes beyond just that infamous day. Yesterday, Alan Feuer reported for the NY Times on the case of a deranged 33 year old Tennessee MAGAt, Edward Kelley, swept up in the insanity of Trump, Lake and Finchem-like crackpots. Kelley is already facing charges of assaulting a police officer during the insurrection. Yesterday, he was arrested and charged “with plotting to assassinate several of the federal agents who had investigated him and to attack the FBI’s field office in Knoxville.” Kelley put together a list of 37 assassination targets. One of his buddies ratted him out to the Feds and recorded him and another MAGAt, 26 year old Austin Carter, conspiring to commit murder and mayhem. t the moment, they are both in jail, having been denied bail.