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There are rumblings from Donald Trump insiders that the former president is growing increasingly concerned that former TV personality Kari Lake will blow the GOP's chances of picking up a Senate seat and that her unpopularity in Arizona will also hurt his re-election chances.
It was previously reported that the former president became annoyed with Lake because she was causing him problems with his wife Melania because of her constant presence at his Mar-a-Lago resort. On Monday, the Washington Post reported the rift also was based over Trump's concerns she is not out doing enough campaigning.
As the report notes, the race to fill the seat being vacated by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) is one of the most closely watched in the 2024 election and Lake, a political novice with one failed bid for statewide office in 2022, is expected to face Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-
Adding to Lake's woes is her undoing the damage of her attacking Arizona's McCain Republicans whom she disparaged during her losing 2022 bid, as well as distrust from GOP higher-ups in her state who are still furious with her for secretly recording the former state party chair asking her to reconsider running.
According to the new Post report, there is growing tension between the Trump and Lake camps that she will be a detriment in a close election and that Trump has had to urge her to decamp from Mar-a-Lago and get to work winning over voters.
Appellate judges listening to arguments Thursday in Kari Lake’s challenge to her 2022 election loss had to keep reminding her lawyer how appeals courts work.
“I’m sure you’re aware we’re not a fact-finding court — we’re a court that decides questions of law, primarily,” Judge Peter Eckerstrom told Kurt Olsen, Lake’s attorney, shortly after he began his arguments.
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More than once during the proceedings, which lasted less than an hour, the judges had to remind Olsen, a Washington, D.C., employment attorney, that the function of the appeals court is to determine if the trial judge made mistakes in interpreting and applying the law, not in determining the facts of the case.
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At the end of the hearing, Eckerstrom attempted one final time to push Olsen to make arguments that are appropriate for an appeals court.
“We are a court of law and we don’t decide facts in the first instance, and the thrust of what you’ve been arguing in your summation is facts and fact findings,” Eckerstrom told Olsen. “Could you identify what the trial court did wrong, as a matter of law? What’s your primary argument that the trial court did as a matter of law?”
Olsen answered that the trial court judge improperly set the bar too high in requiring that Lake prove election fraud, instead of a lower bar of unintentional error or suspicion that the results couldn’t be trusted. He added that the purportedly new evidence regarding the tabulators showed that county officials tried to downplay ballot printer and tabulator issues on Election Day.
That's exactly right. Any time anyone has just a suspicion that the results of an election can't be trusted, the whole election needs to be thrown out and done again. That's what he's asking the court to rule. Stupid asshole.Olsen answered that the trial court judge improperly set the bar too high in requiring that Lake prove election fraud, instead of a lower bar of unintentional error or suspicion that the results couldn’t be trusted.
They have to go by intuition. Data-driven doesn't work well for them.
https://www.marchofdimes.org/peristats/ ... =3&sreg=04Alex Cole @acnewsitics wrote: Do they have black or brown people in Arizona?
https://azmirror.com/2024/05/21/kari-la ... w-license/Kari Lake attorney skips disciplinary hearing as the AZ State Bar seeks to suspend his law license
In a video posted to social media after the hearing, Bryan Blehm flipped the middle finger at the Bar
One of the lawyers who represented Kari Lake in her 2022 election challenge case skipped out on a disciplinary hearing Tuesday for making false claims to the Arizona Supreme Court that could leave him unable to practice law, instead literally throwing up a middle finger at the Arizona State Bar.
Bryan Blehm, a Scottsdale divorce attorney, along with Kurt Olsen, a Washington, D.C., employment attorney, were both ordered to pay $2,000 in sanctions last year for writing in an appeal that it was an “undisputed fact” that more than 35,000 falsified ballots were illegally inserted into batches of legal ballots in Maricopa County when the November 2022 ballots were being sorted shortly after Election Day.
The Supreme Court found that Olsen and Blehm provided no evidence of the claim and sanctioned Lake and her team for making “false factual statements to the Court.” Lawyers for the State Bar of Arizona told Presiding Disciplinary Judge Margaret Downie during a May 21 hearing that Blehm’s license should be suspended for six months and one day for lying to the Supreme Court, as well as for his refusal to take responsibility for his actions and to even show up for the hearing.
Blehm and Olsen are both facing disciplinary action for making the false claim about illegal ballots in Lake’s failed challenge to the results of the 2022 governor’s race that she lost to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes.
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