Judge Won't Seal Sidney Powell's Secret 'Kraken' Witnesses
By: Adam Klasfeld (Law Crime)
couple this with the michigan AG announcing she'll be following the GOP recommendation to investigate the fund raising based around this bogus election fraud scam.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Days before a hearing to decide whether "Kraken" lawyers Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and their co-counsel should face heavy sanctions, a federal judge denied an old motion to keep three of the supposed witnesses' identities under seal. Two of the once-secret witnesses in that litigation have been revealed via public reporting late last year.
The "Kraken" is the name Powell gave to her legal team's multi-armed effort to overturn President Joe Biden's victories in Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia following the 2020 election. After all four efforts failed, the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit gunned for punishment against the team of lawyers which filed the case in the Wolverine State. The state filed complaints directly with the bar, and Detroit asked a federal judge to refer every "Kraken" lawyer who appeared in the Michigan prong of the legal offensive for disbarment proceedings.
That sanctions hearing is currently scheduled for Monday morning, but U.S. District Judge Linda Parker, who will determine the lawyers' fate, resolved some unfinished business first on Friday.
Among other points of a four-page ruling, Judge Parker rejected Powell's request to seal the names of three supposed "witnesses" she claimed would suffer "grave risk of harm" should their identities be disclosed.
Unimpressed with the request, Parker noted: "Courts have long recognized a 'strong presumption in favor of openness' regarding court records."
Though precedent mandates only the "most compelling reasons" can justify secrecy, Parker ruled that Powell offered only "mere speculation and conclusory statements of possible harm" to unidentified people.
As the Washington Post reported, at least two of the once-secret "Kraken" witnesses had inflated their credentials, did not disclose their checkered pasts, and appeared to make false statements on sworn affidavits. One such witness, alternately code-named "Spider" and "Spyder," was revealed by the paper to be Joshua Merritt, who was touted as a "military intelligence expert" but was actually an army vehicle mechanic—and reportedly never worked in military intelligence.
Another witness, Terpsichore "Tore" Maras-Lindeman, was billed as a secret intelligence contractor but was depicted by the Post as a small-town fraudster because of her civil prosecution in North Dakota that led to more than $25,000 in penalties and attorneys' fees for allegedly duping donors a supposed Christmas fundraiser. A pro-Trump podcaster, her Navy experience reportedly lasted less than a year.
The judge's ruling denying the sealing of such witnesses is a boon for Detroit's lawyer David Fink, whose motion requesting sanctions cites the secret supposed informants as an example of the "Kraken" team's "fraud on the court."
"For instance, Plaintiffs claim that their self-proclaimed experts include a military intelligence analyst, but when they accidentally disclosed his name, the 'expert' was revealed to have washed out of the training course for military intelligence," he wrote in January. "Plaintiffs' counsel did not redact the information to 'protect' the 'informant,' they did so to hide their fraud on the court."
Resolving a handful of other motions, Judge Parker set aside remaining motions to dismiss the matter as moot because the "Kraken" team voluntarily withdrew their lawsuit after their first stinging defeat late last year. Detroit sought to secure judicial notice of a Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight report affirming that election fraud claims were bogus, but Judge Parker found any additional material would be unnecessary to decide the matter before her.
"The Court does not require supplemental briefing to assess its ability to sanction Attorney L. Lin Wood in this case," she wrote.
Every lawyer who signed pleadings or briefs for the "Kraken" team in Michigan must appear via Zoom at Monday's hearing, including Wood, Powell, Stefanie Junttila, Scott Hagerstrom, Julia Haller, Brandon Johnson, Howard Kleinhendler, and Gregory Rohl.
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golly, all the coming perp walks might be tough to trump-splain to those independent voters in a year...
I'm sure a number of whataboutism squirrels will be released early in the week and the Kraken team will be deemed as off topic along with the seeder.
Off-topic seeder and Sidney would make a dynamic duo.
Good. Make their stupid, deceptive, so-called, "professionals" stand behind their words. After all, whatever they are allowed to get away with-by evening news Monday they will be on Fox News "crowing" or "weeping" about it!
In the picture above I remember that wretched lawyer woman, 'employing' crocodile tears in an effort to precipitate Right-wing displays of violence locally and nationally. You could be forgiven for thinking at the 'presser' she had her 'waterworks' going because of some poor child's live lost to policing violence or the swelling numbers of COVID deaths in late 2020 and early 2021. Well, you would be mistaken. She was 'pooling' over wacked-up Donald J. Trump not being able to manipulate Georgian officials into selling out its citizens voting rights and privileges to let Donald have an undeserved chance of taking Georgia in 2020.
Well, we all thought that now that Trump is out of office, comedians would have to start writing their own jokes again. Were we ever wrong.
It is so typical of the kind of "good old boy culture" that people have decried for centuries. Trump and his supporters want it to be what MAGA is about. Bringing back all the repressions and suppressions whereby people got stupidly rich by cutthroat tricks and tactics and throwing innocent people under the oppression 'bus' where they are flattened.
Note (and I am going to have to temper my words because I am about to get pissed), this . . . woman. . . tried to solicit a judge to hide her bull patty conduct under a protection clause in law. Rank and file people don't get to do such things, but she wanted a court to wink and hide her stupid "patty" so that no-one would know how dirty she and her "dude" lawyer buddy are! The federal judge saw the 'move' for what it is and does not want any part of that!
Sickening. Regular people get used all the time by these "good old boy" networks. Women know it all to well, too!
These thugs want to win by hook or crook, it's all the same to their morals which are "planted" in mid-air. Living large and better lives than the are equipped to live off the misery they deal out to others. Theft, lies, and deceits. And that is what Donald Trump wants more of for this country. That is MAGA!
Well, in this case, instead of getting angry, I'm choosing to have a good, hearty chuckle at their expense. So far, those supporting the "Big Lie" have been a suspended attorney with melting hair who can't tell the difference between a hotel/restaurant and a landscaping company, a hopped-up-on-meth blonde bimbo with a messy bun and a history of criminally harassing her ex's new gal, and now these two victims of delusions of grandeur. Yeah, I'm frustrated that the "Big Lie" is even being spread, but damn, it's not often that I find farce to be this funny.
It pisses me off (almost blindingly that I have a hard time writing in this vein), because "all my life I had to fight" in the words of Alice Walker: The Color Purple. People have been discounting me, Black Americans, and people of color, as a general matter. We simply could not persuade the majority of what we were seeing and experiencing (or they just did not care to hear it). And, I had a (white) lady CEO boss (private company) in the early 2000's who told me of her several misadventures with our local/area male-dominated city hall (the men are gone now). That all stirs up in me, when I see people try to manipulate society to get their way over and beyond dealing properly with the systems in place. (Or, words to that effect - I admit I am 'over-charged' in this moment of writing.)
The low-life lawyers' attempt to keep their phony witnesses secret compounds their fraud.
So if these 8 plus Rudy Guilliani get their butts kicked, sanctioned, fined or worse,
I will laugh at them like I laughed at Michael Avenatti and Michael Cohen's self inflicted punishments.