Tweet
You have to wonder who is stupider – Norm Coleman’s legal team or Norm who keeps paying these guys:
We have seen the best thing that Norm Coleman’s legal team has done so far in this election trial — and it ain’t pretty.
This afternoon the Coleman team was bringing in rejected absentee voters to show that their ballots were improperly tossed. So far the court has heard from six people, most of of whom said they were contacted by the Republican Party in the last few weeks. They mostly seemed sympathetic enough, putting a human face on the disenfranchised Coleman voter — but at least two of them appeared to have been rejected properly under the conditions of Minnesota law.
One of the voters was Douglas Thompson, who admitted under oath that his girlfriend filled out his absentee ballot application for him, signing his name with her own hand and purporting to be himself. His ballot was rejected because the signature on his ballot envelope (his own) did not match the signature on the application (his girlfriend’s). The Coleman team’s argument appears to be that he is still a legal voter in Minnesota, as the signature on the ballot was his own, even if admitted dishonesty was involved in getting the ballot.
Keep in mind: Thompson’s story came up during the direct examination by Coleman lawyer James Langdon. So the Coleman camp fully knew this information and decided to make him into a witness.
[...]
On top of this, the court began over four hours late today, after the judges and lawyers had to go into a closed-door meeting to figure out how to bring in original rejected absentee ballot envelopes in the wake of yesterday’s mess involving the Coleman team making alterations to their photocopied evidence.
Legal Fail.
(Added) Oh Jeebus. I hadn’t even seen this.Giving Norm more money is like sending Acme Co. gift cards to Wile E. Coyote.
15 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About TBogg
RSS/XML Feed
If I were a tax-paying citizen of Minnesota, I’d be a mite perturbed at the Republicans.
Damn, I already sent all of my unemployment check to Sarahpac. Cuz she’s for reform you know. Or something. Maybe Bank of America can help him out.
Look. There’s at LEAST two kinds of fraud. There’s the honest, well intentioned, harmless kind of fraud, and there’s that evil, criminal kind of fraud.
Clearly, Coleman’s legal staff has no difficulty differentiating between the two, and they have every expectation that a judge wouldn’t either.
In traffic court, this is called “Guilty, with an explanation”. It’s always good for a couple laughs before the conviction…
mikey
– You’re assuming he’s going to pay his lawyers, of course. Wouldn’t put it past him to try to screw them, too.
Damn, for true bi-partisan stupidity we just need Norm and Blago team up like some kind of dynamic duo of fail and embarrassment. Maybe a think tank of some sort, so they can hire people like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg to write things that are, you know, wrong and embarrassing. I hear there’s a huge market for that stuff.
Could be worse. He could have hired the idiots from Powerline.
Let’s all chip in and buy an anvil for Al.
I really hope the Repubs send all their money to Norm and Sarah, just in case there are any competent right wing pols who later appear.
The concept of competence is now so completely foreign to the Repubs that they can’t distinguish it from its opposite.
Pretty soon, they’ll be down to arguing that any vote for Franken is de facto voter fraud, because no rational person would have voted for him, so the court should just throw all of Al’s votes out.
Come to think of it, that would at lease be honest, so they probably won’t try that.
One of the voters was Douglas Thompson, who admitted under oath that his girlfriend filled out his absentee ballot application for him, signing his name with her own hand and purporting to be himself.
It takes a crackerjack legal team to put a witness’s girlfriend in legal jeopardy. Mind you, this is the same party whose fringe elements wanted Obama to prove that he wasn’t born in Kenya.
OT, but I just watched last night’s Rachel Maddow interview with Rod Blagojevich, and I can’t beleive this didn’t occur to me before, but he really is Gov. William J. LePetomane, isn’t he? Does this make John Harris Hedley Lamarr?
Hell, they’ve been some of the loudest voices criticizing his legal team. They’ve also been saying whoa-Nellie to the bozos at the Murdoch WSJ’s editorial page, who have been trashing the various justices involved; see, the Powerline boys have to appear before these justices every now and then.
Home Depot Founder Bernie Marcus might be out there scrounging some more Doug Thompsons to vouch for Norm. Remember Bernie from a couple of months ago.
I agree with the stuff about this is just building up the Franken brand as the new gooper fund raiser. They know they lost, its now kabuki to demonize a decent guy. They’re reduce to elementary schoolyard “tactics”. Such a nest of vermin.
Hey, if feckless wingnuts want to make a big bonfire out of their disposable income, I sez, hoo-fucking-rah.