A federal judge Wednesday night dismissed the lawsuit former Trump attorney Sidney Powell filed seeking to overturn Wisconsin’s election results, writing the request was “far outside” the court’s oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.
The suit, filed on behalf of one of the president’s GOP electors, sought to have President Trump declared the winner of Wisconsin’s electoral votes.
But U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper wrote the request amounted to “an extraordinary intrusion on state sovereignty from which a federal court should abstain.”
“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country. One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so,” Pepper wrote.
The suit was one of several filed seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s more than 20,000-vote win in Wisconsin in an effort to award the state’s 10 electoral votes to Trump. The Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to take original action in three different cases, including one filed by the president’s campaign. Trump currently has lawsuits pending in both state and federal court, while the GOP Texas attorney general asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the results in Wisconsin and three other states key to Biden’s victory.
The president has also sought to intervene in the Texas lawsuit.
The suit alleged that software Dominion vote tabulating machines used in Wisconsin was derived from software created by “foreign oligarchs and dictators” as part of a ballot-stuffing scheme to win elections for former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. At one point, the attorneys planned to have a witness identified only as “Spider” in court records testify in court wearing a mask.
The suit Powell filed has been plagued by problems, including initially naming former 3rd CD GOP candidate Derrick Van Orden as one of the plaintiffs even though he didn’t give permission to include him. The original complaint also sought video footage from an arena in Detroit where ballots were counted as part of its effort to overturn Wisconsin’s results.
In her ruling, Pepper suggested the legal team made up a quote from a case it cited in a brief. Pepper wrote she read the page cited in the brief three times and couldn’t find the passage the plaintiffs claimed had been written by one of her colleagues. What’s more, she added the case cited didn’t involve the challenge of a presidential election as claimed by plaintiffs, but of a statute requiring those involved in a referendum to file a registration statement and take other actions.
Pepper ruled Trump elector William Feehan didn’t have standing to file the suit and that it was already moot because Dem Gov. Tony Evers had certified the results and transmitted them. The suit had suggested Evers could address the alleged injuries Feehan suffered by refusing to certify or transmit the results. But Pepper wrote the guv “cannot refuse to do that which he already has done.”
Some Republicans have argued Evers prematurely certified the results. Dean Knudson, a GOP appointee to the state Elections Commission, filed a complaint against Evers earlier this week arguing he violated the law by not waiting until after Trump had exhausted his appeals to certify the results.
Pepper also rejected Feehan’s argument that his vote was diluted by alleged fraud.
“The plaintiff wants Donald J. Trump to be certified as the winner of the Wisconsin election as a result of the plaintiff’s vote. But what he asks is for Donald J. Trump to be certified the winner as a result of judicial fiat,” she wrote.
