At least one day in the future, when Tucker Carlson is explaining to us how good we have it under whatever strongman is paying his fee in those days, we can look back on this perilous period of ours and take some warmth out of the fact that there were judges on the federal bench who could see plainly what so many politicians were doing their damndest to avoid. For example, out in Colorado, there is Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter, who hit a couple of the former president*’s former lawyers with the entire train. From the Washington Post:

In a scathing 68-page opinion, Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter found that the lawyers made little effort to corroborate information they had included in the suit, which argued there had been a vast national conspiracy to steal the election from President Donald Trump. He particularly called out the duo, Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker, for quoting Trump in their legal filing, which cited a presidential tweet that claimed without evidence that voting machines manufactured by the company Dominion Voting Systems had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.” Neureiter called that allegation “highly disputed and inflammatory” and said the lawyers made no efforts to verify it.

Not only did Neureiter make these fakers regret their choice of post-graduate study, he got into their pockets, too, which is fairly standard practice in federal court, but which is delicious nonetheless. The two of them now have to pay the court costs of all the entities they sued. Which means they have to cut checks to, among other concerns, Dominion Voting Systems, as well as to Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. And the judge also made it clear that he’s not done with these people yet.

“In short, this was no slip-and-fall at the local grocery store,” wrote Neureiter, who was appointed as a magistrate judge by other judges. “Albeit disorganized and fantastical, the Complaint’s allegations are extraordinarily serious and, if accepted as true by large numbers of people, are the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.” While the lawyers attached affidavits from various people who alleged the election had been rigged — a common tactic of Trump supporters in the dozens of challenges filed in the months after the election — Neureiter said a close examination of the testimony showed it was “notable only in demonstrating no firsthand knowledge by any Plaintiff of any election fraud, misconduct, or malfeasance.”

Perhaps Neureiter was shocked into action by the raw chutzpah that the two mouthpieces demonstrated in bringing the suit in the first place.

During a hearing last month, they argued that they had a good-faith belief that the election was stolen and that they did not trust government officials and others who had affirmed there was no widespread fraud. Fielder told the judge that when they filed their case in December, they saw the potential for violence stemming from discontent over possible fraud and thought their suit offered an alternative path for resolving concerns. “We’re peaceful people. We wanted to come to court and resolve it in a peaceful way,” he said. “What happened on January 6 was exactly what we predicted in the complaint.”

“We brought our utterly meritless and delusional legal action so crazy people would bust into the Capitol and wreck the joint, so it’s pretty much your fault that the place got trashed,” is derived from a logic with which I am unfamiliar, and which obviously ran counter to the judge’s sense of reality. The lawsuit, and the insanity behind it, was, he said, “The stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”

Hard to argue that point in retrospect now.

From: Esquire US
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Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.