Paul Gosar is one bad character, one of Congress' worst members— and the people who keep reelecting him to Congress? At best, the brains of these folks in western Arizona are so baked by the intense sun that they don’t know what they’re doing! That's the kindest explanation I can think of. In 2020, fully three-quarters of the voters in the 4th district chose to send Trump back to the White House. And 70% wanted Gosar back in Congress. And voters in Mohave County, the heart of the district, gave Gosar a 53 point margin over his Democratic opponent, Delina DiSanto. It isn't coincidental that Mohave County is also the least vaccinated county in the state (43% fully vaccinated, compared to Apache (95%), Santa Cruz (95%) and Navajo (80%).
Gosar participated in the J-6 march to the Capitol— and he wasn’t alone. Two of his cronies from the state legislature, Mark Finchem (now the GOP candidate for Secretary of State) and Anthony Kern, marched right along with him. It’s also worth noting that Gosar, Congress’ most devout follower of Marjorie Traitor Greene, was one of the first members to call for defunding the FBI— along he put it a little differently: “We must destroy the FBI.” And when one of his constituents said the language disturbed him, Gosar replied, “Okay. Be disturbed. We're going to dismantle and eliminate the FBI.”
Gosar’s accountability isn’t likely to come at the ballot box, not with the gerrymandered district he now represents. This morning, though, Adam Klasfeld, writing for Law&Crime reported on one small step towards accountability— not just for Gosar, but for his two insurrectionist cronies from the legislature as well. The three goons were fined $75,000 by a state judge “for filing a defamation lawsuit against a Democratic lawmaker ‘primarily for the purposes of harassment.”
Joining forces with Arizona state Reps. Mark Finchem and Anthony Kern as co-plaintiffs, Gosar sued the Grand Canyon State’s Democratic Rep. Charlene Fernandez in Yuma County Supreme Court last year. Fernandez had joined 41 Arizona lawmakers in asking federal law enforcement to investigate whether they had an involvement or participation in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Dated Jan. 12, the letter was signed the day after Kern’s term of office expired.
Gosar, Finchem and Kern sued a little more than a month later on Feb. 26, 2021.
In a 6-page order, Superior Court Judge Pro Tem Levi Gunderson noted that Fernandez “had the right” to make her concerns known to law enforcement.
“Plaintiffs brought their claim without substantial justification, meaning that it was groundless and not made in good faith,” the order states.
For the judge, the trio’s lawsuit had signs from the start that it was not a serious defamation complaint.
“It very much appears that a significant portion of the contents of the original complaint and the first amended complaint were written for an audience other than the assigned trial court judge,” the ruling states, alluding to the lawsuit’s references to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The judge noted that even the second amended complaint contained “wholly irrelevant” riffs on political issues like “open borders.”
“The Court finds that Plaintiffs’ lawsuit against Defendant was brought for an improper purpose, having been filed against a political opponent primarily for purposes of harassment,” the order states.
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