‘Team Kraken’ Lawyer Humiliated By Federal Judge Over Frivolous Lawsuit

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Amazingly, a conservative group known as the Job Creators Network (JCN) has filed a federal lawsuit trying to force Major League Baseball to move their All-Star Game back to Georgia, from which the league moved the planned game in protest of a set of suppressive voting restrictions that Georgia Republican leaders recently enacted.

In their case, JCN is represented by attorney Howard Kleinhendler — who was also a member of the legal team involved with the Trump-aligned “Kraken” lawsuits that sought to get the presidential election outcomes in multiple states thrown out. The “Kraken” lawsuits all failed, and the JCN case doesn’t seem to be going great for Kleinhendler’s side either. On Thursday, Kleinhendler delivered oral arguments in the case — and during the hearing, federal Judge Valerie Caproni ended up “eviscerating” his arguments, as Law & Crime put it. The lawsuit hadn’t been formally dismissed by the end of Thursday’s hearing, but the judge said that to describe the case as “weak and muddled is an understatement.”

As Law & Crime explains in reference to the controversial new Georgia election restrictions bill, Kleinhendler “claimed that the league’s opposition to SB 202 damaged his client because—if the MLB succeeded in rescinding the legislation—democracy in Georgia would be harmed by the dilution of valid votes.” Caproni adeptly observed that Kleinhendler had “gotten so far afield of your client’s interests,” because there’s just no meaningful tangible connection between the theoretical impacts of rescinding a certain bill at some point in the future and the immediate, actionable interests of the Job Creators Network. Of course, rescinding the Georgia election restrictions would not spark a surge of fraud according to any reasonable estimation, but observing as much isn’t even necessary to see the ridiculousness of Kleinhendler’s arguments.

Kleinhendler also argued that Major League Baseball counts as a so-called state actor because of their acceptance of government funds — but a lot of interests take money from the government, and that doesn’t automatically make them a “public actor,” as the judge put it. At one point, as Caproni took in Kleinhendler’s outrageous arguments, she even exclaimed, “For God’s sake!” Although the case hasn’t been formally set aside, the judge has apparently concluded (among other problems) that the plaintiff lacked standing to bring the case.