Kari Lake scrambles to get out of yet another self-inflicted legal mess, but the odds appear against her
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Kari Lake is doing anything and everything she can to avoid suffering the same fate as Rudy Giuliani, who recently filed for bankruptcy after being ordered to pay $148 million in punitive and compensatory damages for defaming two election workers in Georgia.
The drag-hating former gubernatorial loser and current U.S. Senate candidate from Arizona just filed an appeal challenging a Maricopa County judge’s ruling to allow a defamation lawsuit against her to go forward.
If you’re new to the story, Lake is being sued by Stephen Richer, one of Maricopa County’s top elections officials, after she falsely accused him of tampering with the 2022 election results and ultimately cost her the election.
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Specifically, Lake said Richer, who also happens to be a Republican BTW, “sabotaged” electronic ballot printers and inserting 300,000 fake ballots into the Maricopa County ballot count.
In reality, Richer didn’t do anything wrong and Lake lost the election fair and square to Democrat Katie Hobbs by 17,000 votes.
His lawsuit demands the MAGA queen, her campaign, and a campaign-related fund stop trashing him and scrub all false and defamatory statements about him from their websites and social media pages.
“She’s allowed to insult me, criticize my abilities, criticize my hair,” Richer told reporters. “She is not allowed to say that I did something that was criminally unlawful, something that has been adjudicated by multiple courts as absolutely, positively not happening.”
Lake has tried to get the suit dismissed twice. But she failed both times.
In a 13-page decision released last month, Superior Court Judge Jay Adleman sided with Richer, ruling that Lake’s accusations were, indeed, defamatory and could be proven false to a jury, based on all the evidence provided to the court.
“Defendant Lake’s statements regarding improper 19-inch ballots and/or the existence of 300,000 fraudulent ballots may be discerned by a factfinder as either true or false when considered in the light of any available evidence. These statements constitute assertions of fact that are actionable under prevailing Arizona law,” Adleman wrote.
Now, Lake’s team is asking the Arizona Court of Appeals to intervene and determine whether her most recent request to have the suit dismissed was improperly denied.
Lake urged the appellate court to consider the issue because, as a candidate for U.S. Senate, the lawsuit is “a matter of significant statewide importance” and “significant judicial and litigant resources will be extended” if it proceeds.
“Defendants expect the trial to run at least 10-14 days, with tens of thousands of pages of exhibits, a half-dozen or more expert witnesses, which will be preceded by dozens of discovery disputes,” her appeal states.
She also tried to say her defamatory statements about Richer are protected under the First Amendment and that Adleman’s ruling last month was informed by an unfair state law designed to deter lawsuits that seek to censor or intimidate critics.
Richer now has until January 16 to respond to Lake’s petition before the appellate court will decide how to proceed. But given that the MAGA queen has lost virtually every lawsuit and appeal surrounding her 2022 gubernatorial election loss, we’re guessing this one won’t be any different.
In other Lake news, during an interview on the far-right Real America’s Voice network last week, she peddled a wild COVID conspiracy theory like it was still the year 2020, saying “they” unleashed the virus in order to stop Donald Trump from getting reelected.
“These are some of the most corrupt, disgusting evil people in the world,” she said, without actually clarify who she was talking about.
Democrats? Drag queens? LGBTQ+ people in general? Who knows? Lake didn’t say, other than to accuse them of “pushing this globalist agenda and they don’t care who they destroy in the process.”
“They’ve got to win and get that globalist agenda moved forward and the one man that’s most dangerous to that globalist agenda — which by the way, will be the end of America, the globalist agenda — the one man standing in their way is the man you just saw on your screen, President Donald J. Trump,” she said.
“And that is why they unleashed viruses, they’ve tried to destroy economies, they’ve tried to shut down the country — to stop him.”
Lake is currently running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Arizona. She is currently leading in most polls and is considered the party’s frontrunner.
But with the state’s GOP primary still more than two months away, and with Lake continuing to lose one court case after another, while making negative headlines for her outlandish remarks, a nomination is no guarantee.
