Former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell filed two highly anticipated lawsuits late Wednesday evening aimed at overturning the results of the presidential election in Michigan and Georgia.
The so-called “Kraken” legal filings have been much ballyhooed by supporters and allies of President Donald Trump—despite the fact Powell’s recent performance in public was too bizarre for the 45th president. The Trump campaign distanced itself from Powell just eight days after the president loudly professed to believe that the fire-breathing attorney’s legal acumen augured exceptionally well for the all-but impossible odds against changing the outcome of the 2020 electoral contest.
Legal observers and reporters, however, quickly noticed a few mistakes in Powell’s filings.
These are the first lines of Sidney Powell’s “kraken” lawsuit that Trump supporters have been claiming would save his presidency, not looking great. The rest is just rehashed witness affidavits, including one that claims the ballot paper was suspiciously clean. pic.twitter.com/oihuMeZeig
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 26, 2020
“The Kraken is typos!” joked federal appellate attorney Raffi Melkonian via Twitter.
Those typos included two different misspellings of the word “district” at the very top of the Georgia complaint:
Oh
“In the Georgia complaint, which was only available on Powell’s website, the word district in the court name was misspelled twice on the first page of the document. First there was an extra c for ‘DISTRICCT’ and then, a few words later, ‘DISTRCOICT.’https://t.co/0YwuqJqkDl
— Jennifer Taub (@jentaub) November 26, 2020
Good morning!
I read Sidney Powell's Georgia election lawsuit she's filing and it's a regurgitation of conspiracies, lies and misunderstandings about elections that other courts+officials have shut down.
For starters: spelling is hard. #gapol
Link: https://t.co/t4P9bssdvJ pic.twitter.com/wxCm1CdmJ1
— stephen fowler covers Georgia's election! (@stphnfwlr) November 26, 2020
only the most serious lawyers strongly bringing the most perfect lawsuit spell like this pic.twitter.com/XE46y0fBxY
— [email protected] (@TheGlare_TM) November 26, 2020
New York-based attorney and author Luppe B. Luppen had a similar take–and showcased his own attempts at correcting those issues:
Started trying to proofread the Sidney Powell complaint and I didn’t get very far. I wouldn’t recommend filing this version in court, Sod. https://t.co/bUnKg6jMNe pic.twitter.com/PlR4xNIimO
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 26, 2020
Others pointed to more fundamental/legal problems with the briefs:
Look, these are sanctionable filings. No one is going to issue sanctions, but they are. And not because of the typos. https://t.co/YQsesPKB2v
— Raffi Melkonian (@RMFifthCircuit) November 26, 2020
forget to run spell check. You don’t make wild accusations.
I mean, seriously, this is not what professionals do. This is the stuff that gets the judge to throw the book at you. It gets the bar association to inquire into your conduct. /end
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) November 26, 2020
Seriously, did they file an actual motion for an emergency temporary restraining order yet? Otherwise, this lawsuit would take weeks to begin under the existing rules. https://t.co/l0KSj8cZC2
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) November 26, 2020
Just in: Cobb County GOP chair Jason Shepherd, one of seven plaintiffs on Sidney Powell’s lawsuit targeting Georgia’s election, tells me he never agreed to be a part of her complaint. “Guess this is what happens when you wait until the last minute.” #gapol pic.twitter.com/2TmhVJ5ylK
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) November 26, 2020
It’s not fraudulent. Just a mistake. We were removed from the list of plaintiffs at the top, but I did wait until the nth hour to let them know. When preparing a 100+ page complaint, I’m not faulting anyone on her team for not catching that.
— Jason Shepherd (@JasonShepherd) November 26, 2020
The lawsuits themselves name the governors of Michigan and Georgia as defendants and allege that multiple ballots were forged in both states as well as complaining that ballot canvassing observers were unable to meaningfully oversee the vote count.
Neither lawsuit is expected to make it very far in the federal court system and both of the error-plagued filings will likely need to be resubmitted in order to amend the numerous formatting mistakes that literally make certain segments essentially unreadable.
For example:
We’re trying to read her Michigan complaint. Does anyone here speak Gibberish? pic.twitter.com/diluYt0yEh
— Angry Fleas (@AngryFleas) November 26, 2020
Attorney Ken White excoriated Powell over her haphazard and clumsy filings pre-Thanksgiving lawsuits.
“It reads like it was drafted by [Jeanine Pirro] after a Black Friday sale at BevMo,” he tweeted.
To date, Trump and his attorneys–current and former–have adamantly waged a public relations campaign aimed at convincing the president’s base that widespread electoral and voter fraud occurred during the 2020 election. Also to date, no evidence has been provided that supports those allegations, but the fundraising efforts continue. Powell’s lawsuits will almost certainly not change that calculus but were welcomed by the MAGA faithful who appear determined to go down fighting–no matter how much ridicule and scorn they incur on the way out.
As for the long-awaited Kraken attack on the 2020 election results, the effort waged was decidedly not cephalopod-like in appearance.
But for some, the typos were all part of the “plan,” whatever that is.
Totally normal, not-deranged people just normally believing harmless not-deranged things and you should totally not call these people stupid or crazy or anything because clearly they are not at all deranged. https://t.co/EV21OytFh3
— Ari Cohn (@AriCohn) November 26, 2020
[image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images]
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