Another election fraud case by Sydney Powell and Lin Wood is going down in flames as a Michigan judge finds their affidavits of voting shenanigans in Detroit were not responsibly vetted. “There’s a duty that counsel has that when you’re submitting a sworn statement … that you have reviewed it, that you had done some minimal due diligence,” she said. They had not.
Going through the list of rejected claims, one jumped out at me.
One declaration came from a witness referred to by the lawyers in court documents only as “Spider.” In his sworn declaration, he claimed to be a former military intelligence expert who had discovered server traffic revealing that Iran and China had tampered with the election. But The Washington Post revealed in December that “Spider” was actually a 43-year-old Texas-based information technology consultant named Joshua Merritt who never worked in military intelligence.
Records show he enrolled in a training program with a military intelligence battalion but never completed the entry-level course, an Army spokeswoman told The Post. Records show that Merritt spent most of his decade in the U.S. Army as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic.
How dare he steal the honorable name of “Spider”! Can he be arrested for that?
I suspect that the more serious accusation is that he lied about his credentials and expertise. Being a “wheeled-vehicle mechanic” is an honorable job that does require considerable skill and knowledge — my father was a mechanic, too — but it probably doesn’t prepare you in military intelligence or cybersecurity, and doesn’t involve any training in cracking the information communications going on in Iran and China.
This kind of thing is all Powell and Wood have — people swearing that they saw a mysterious bag that could have held ballots, that sort of thing, and the lawyers didn’t carry out even a superficial scrutiny of the claims.
If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials. But she could also go further — assessing additional monetary penalties or recommending grievance proceedings be opened that could result in banning the attorneys from practicing in Michigan or disbarring them altogether.
Yes, please.
By the way, you may have heard that one of the lawyers was weeping, and later resigned from the Wood/Powell team. This wasn’t because she was humiliated in court. She later said she wasn’t crying, she was just furious because no one was defending her hero Donald Trump as he deserved.
Did they find ‘Spider’ in an ad in the back of a Solider of Fortune magazine?
You can trust me. After all, I am a High School Graduate!
Naw, he probably heard of a web crawler, aka spinerbot and stumbled on with it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
My son is currently an AIT student at Fort Huachuca, AZ. We’ve discussed this “Spyder/Spider” character on a couple of different occasions, since the latter was – at one point – with the 305th (one of the MI training battalions within the 111th MI Brigade). In addition to the inflated claims of expertise made by “Spider” and the “Kraken” attorneys, apparently a range of conspiracy theorists believe that the 305th itself has confirmed the election was stolen (according to the WaPo, they believe the 305th discovered the vote was manipulated by China and Iran).
Suffice it to say, my son finds this to be darkly hilarious.
@4, Heh, I hadn’t heard that nonsense. Some admittedly very quick searching found this, Anybody seen Gina Haspel? Long post-election stirs an appetite for alternative facts (December 2020 (before the insurrection), emphasis in the original):
I’ve found the (competing?) “flipping votes from hair furor to Biden using teh Jewish Space Lasers controlled from Italy” conspiracy lunacy to be quite entertaining. (That actual lunacy asserts military satellites rather than Jewish Space Lasers were used, but it’s more fun to assert the Jewish Space Lasers did it too!)
“If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case”
100% this should happen. These endless recounts and lawsuits and other shenanigans are a money pit and so far that pit is being filled with taxpayer money. Enough is enough. Biden won the election fair and square.
And, where is the proof for that Iranian and Chinese internet traffic?
Without documentation and evidence, it is simply a claim made by a random internet troll.
And there isn’t any such proof because if there was, they would have included it with their court filing.
He also almost certainly doesn’t have the access to even monitor such server traffic.
Spider?
More like Spyderp.
That whole set of lawsuits dismissed by the Michigan Justice was a whole clusterfuck of nonsense assertions. EG one
affidavit was [swearing they saw some random person holding an unmarked bag, they were ‘pretty sure’ were ballots stolen from the polls.] This was presented as hard evidence of fraud.
I like the Michigan judge reading it and responding,
“WTF are you including this nonsense in a legal proceeding? (are you really lawyers)
“Get them disbarred”
funny how all the lawyers that signed these allegations are now backing out saying they signed them, didn’t draft them so they can’t be held responsible, and the people who drafted the papers are saying they only drafted them, didn’t sign them so they can’t be held accountable.
how ironic that lawyers usually tell their clients to read carefully every word, before signing anything, as signatures are ironclad proof of agreement to everything in the document with no means of escape.
blf “ I’ve found the (competing?) “flipping votes from hair furor to Biden using teh Jewish Space Lasers controlled from Italy” conspiracy lunacy to be quite entertaining. (That actual lunacy asserts military satellites rather than Jewish Space Lasers were used, but it’s more fun to assert the Jewish Space Lasers did it too!)”
I got a good laugh just imagining what Mel Brooks could have done with this.
@5: the WaPo article I was referring to is here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sidney-powell-spider-spyder-witness/2020/12/11/0cd567e6-3b2a-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html
Knowing what I know about the goings on within the student ranks at Fort Huachuca, this is… pretty far out there.
Has Trump during his tenure as president and after ever managed to hire somebody competent who stuck with him? Because it sure doesn’t look like it from a distance.
Then again, it’s not like the Trump administration has covered itself in glory.
So it would be understandable for competent people to want to avoid that particular dumpster fire.
Ray Ceeya @ # 6: Biden won the election fair and square.
I really wish people would stop saying this.
More accurately: Biden won the election despite major Republican vote suppression.
I remember fondly the ditzy blonde who said that they have to believe her because she signed a affidavit and could go to jail if were’t true.
All of the GQP cases seem to be variations on “we can prove that many people believe fraud occurred.”