Judge Delivers 48th Court Loss To Trump Allies With Latest Dismissal

0
1003

Judge Jane Barwick of Georgia’s Fulton County Superior Court has now dismissed a lawsuit in which a Georgia resident named John Wood sought to invalidate the presidential election results in the state, where Biden won. Barwick dismissed the lawsuit “effectively on the grounds that Wood was suing the wrong people,” local media outlet WXIA-TV explains. Wood named Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (both of whom are Republicans) as defendants, but Barwick concluded that “there’s not a statutory basis for these named individuals being respondents in this case.” In other words, there’s no apparent legal standing for Wood’s particular strand of election-related court challenge against state officials.

Originally, Wood claimed that officials had “so mismanaged the election process that no one can have faith that one of their most sacred rights under the United States and Georgia Constitutions, voting, is being protected.” There’s no actual legitimate evidence for this claim. In the original lawsuit, Wood also claimed that “based on the government’s data, it is estimated that there were 204,143 illegal votes counted and legal votes not counted—exceeding the Presidential contest margin of 12,670 votes in Georgia,” but this claim of a whopping number of mishandled votes simply isn’t legitimate. There’s no legitimate evidence for the claim, which relied on bunk so-called data analyses that Trump-allied attorney Sidney Powell also used for her lawsuit in the state — which also got dismissed on Monday.

On Monday, Fulton County said that they’d rejected a lawsuit with Trump listed as a plaintiff “over issues with paying the appropriate filing fees and fully completing a Case Information Form, as required,” WXIA-TV explains. The immediate future of that case, including a potential re-filing with the identified issues fixed, was not immediately clear. The original filing named Kemp, Raffensperger, and over a dozen county elections officials as defendants, but Barwick’s ruling suggests that the lawsuit may need to name each individual county with alleged fraud as defendants in order to stand, assuming that a re-filing is on the horizon.

On Monday, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that “Between rapidly approaching deadlines, Giuliani being hospitalized and a string of court losses, there is a sense developing internally that the Trump legal team’s efforts are coming to a close” — which seems like a potential understatement. Neither Trump nor his allies have come anywhere close to overturning the election outcome anywhere in the country.