Kari Lake Calls Herself Governor, As Her Lawyer Alan Dershowitz Whines In Court. Reality Is Hard.

Living in the real world sucks. Just ask Kevin McCarthy! So Kari Lake, the Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate who can’t stop, won’t stop losing the election, has decided not to. She will simply will her preferred version of the universe into existence, like Oprah and The Secret, only meaner. Toward that end, she spent Wednesday huddled up with weirdos willing to embrace her alternate facts.

Here she is with disgraced former journalist John Solomon, referring to herself as “the real governor, the duly-elected governor” of Arizona, even after Governor Katie Hobbs was officially sworn in.

“With President Trump they did this in the middle of the night. But our movement was so big and so powerful that they couldn’t just do this in the middle of the night. They had to do this in broad daylight so everyone saw it,” she fulminated, referring to election fraud which she has failed to allege with particularity in any of her eleventy-seven court challenges, despite “everyone” seeing it.

“The way we get change is we get the real governor, the duly-elected governor, myself, in there with lawmakers to change our laws, put some teeth into the laws, and frankly we need to recall every one of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors,” she went on.

That’s right, girl, tweet through it.

And here she is on Steve Bannon’s show promising that she’ll keep suing until she finds “one judge that loves the Constitution and loves this country. We’re going to expose each and every one of them. And the walls are going to start to close in on them.”

“Katie Hobbs was not duly elected,” she added. “Everybody in the state knows that. And she can play house and play governor for a while. But eventually, the truth is going to catch up and we will win.”

Meanwhile, Lake’s lawyers are also finding that reaping is not nearly so much fun as sowing. And no one is having a more bitter harvest than Alan Dershowitz, who put his name on the federal clown suit Lake filed in her unending search for that “one judge that loves the Constitution and loves this country.” Apparently US District Judge John J. Tuchi isn’t it since he just sanctioned Dersh and the other two lawyers on this dumb turkey. Lake sued just weeks before the midterm election to force the state to use all paper ballots and count the votes by hand, on the theory that the machines were untested and easily hacked. In point of fact, the state already uses paper ballots, the machines are tested and a partial hand recount is required by law, and hand counting all the votes would take months. Indeed, the recount of the 2020 election which the plaintiff pointed to as proof of concept — AKA the “Arizona Fraudit” — took six months and was only possible because the state was already using paper ballots.

“Plaintiffs either failed to conduct the reasonable factual and legal inquiry required under Rule 11, or they conducted such an inquiry and filed this lawsuit anyway. Either way, no reasonable attorney, after conducting an objectively reasonable inquiry into the facts and law, would have found the complaint to be well-founded,” Judge Tuchi wrote in a scathing order finding attorneys Andrew Parker, Kurt Olsen, and Alan Dershowitz liable for $141,690.00 in attorneys’ fees and costs. [Internal quotations omitted.] Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure lays out the standards for filing a proper pleading, and a judicial finding that a lawyer has violated it is very, very bad.

Dershowitz responded with a show cause motion demanding that Maricopa County come in and explain why he should be sanctioned along with the other attorneys who signed the misbegotten complaint and pleadings. Dershowitz claims that he was only a constitutional consultant hired by the other attorneys — something he failed to mention between August 10, when Maricopa County moved for sanctions, and December 29. He also implies that his co-counsel improperly put his name on documents and whines that he has “already suffered greatly and disproportionately from the sanction order” because one time the website Law & Crime called him the “lead lawyer” in the matter.