(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) An Arizona judge has greenlighted a lawsuit by a Maricopa County election official alleging that MAGA superstar Kari Lake engaged in what might amount to libel or slander against him.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer sued Lake in June for defamation in connection with her criticism of the chaos that occurred on Election Day 2022 in the Phoenix area.
Maricopa Superior Court Judge Jay Adleman rejected Lake’s First Amendment argument for dismissing the lawfare attack, which could have chilling implications for other candidates attempting to highlight voting irregularities and questionable practices.
Richer, although nominally a Republican, was revealed to have operated a Democrat-funded political-action committee that opposed Lake’s gubernatorial run.
Adelman ruled that Richer’s lawsuit was “limited in scope” to allegations that he was directly to blame for widespread ballot-scanning issues that were traced back to a faulty printer setting, as well as another allegation that Richer stuffed 300,000 illegal ballots into the final tally.
“With this limitation in mind, the Court is satisfied that the disputed statements—if indeed they are ‘provable’ as false or defamatory—would be undeserving of the protections associated with our First Amendment principles,” Adleman explained in his 13-page decision.
Reporting from the Arizona Daily Star suggested that the burden of proof would now fall on Lake to prove the claims true in order “to avoid being found guilty of defaming him
It was unclear whether this was correctly reported as it would subvert the normal legal standard requiring the plaintiff to prove the falsity of any defamatory allegations, among other things.
However, in at least two recent high-profile defamation cases—those involving right-wing figures Alex Jones and Rudy Giuliani—the leftist judges have made predeterminations of guilt, leaving the trials themselves to ascertain just how much the “victim” was owed and placing considerable constraints on the defense.
Lake, the GOP frontrunner in the 2024 senatorial campaign to unseat incumbent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, doubled down on her criticism of Richer in a tweet reacting to the judge’s ruling.
“An elected government official is suing me for revealing the corruption in the elections he administered,” Lake wrote.
“…This is about taking away our First Amendment rights and interfering in the US Senate race,” she continued. “The case should have been tossed out of court.”
An elected government official is suing me for revealing the corruption in the elections he administered.
He has a bunch of Soros-backed
attorneys representing him.This is about taking away our First Amendment rights and interfering in the US Senate race.
This case should… pic.twitter.com/4NrGPayJpU
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) December 20, 2023
Team Lake based part of its unsuccessful argument for a dismissal on Arizona’s anti-SLAPP law, using the acronym for a “strategic lawsuit against public participation.”
Such lawsuits are intended “to silence or intimidate someone who is speaking about a matter of public concern,” the Arizona Republic noted.
The judge, however, wrote that “Richer laid out ‘a factual and legal basis’ for a defamation case and that there was no evidence Richer brought the case improperly,” the news outlet contended.
In an August 2023 article for the Arizona Sun Times, conservative legal commentator Rachel Alexander, a former Maricopa prosecutor, said that the George Soros-backed Protect Democracy Project—described by InfluenceWatch as ”a left-of-center litigation organization created to oppose the policies of President Donald Trump”—was funding Richer’s lawsuit.
Contrary to media claims, the Adleman’s rejection of Lake’s motion to dismiss was hardly a decisive legal victory for Richer, with many facts still in dispute.
The mainstream media was “hysterically covering [the ruling] as if it’s a huge development, when the reality is left wing ASU jumped into the lawsuit in Kari’s defense,” Alexander tweeted recently.
It's hilarious watching the MSM breathlessly cover a judge's rejection of Kari Lake's Motion to Dismiss MaRICOpa County Recorder Stephen Richer's defamatory lawsuit against her over her accusations of election illegalities under him. They're hysterically covering it as if it's a…
— Rachel Alexander (@Rach_IC) December 20, 2023
The First Amendment Clinic at the Tempe-based Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law co-authored Lake’s motion to dismiss.
“They would not have done that unless it was a slam dunk,” noted Alexander. “So the left can keep gloating all they want, this defamation case is going nowhere ultimately, even if it takes a higher court to shut it down.”
In addition to proving the falsity of Lake’s allegations, Richer still faces several obstacles in order to prevail in his suit, given the notoriously high bar the courts have placed on any effort to abrogate or punish political speech.
He must prove that he suffered material damages resulting from the allegations, and also that it was Lake’s intention to cause harm by distorting the truth.
Under established U.S. Supreme Court precedent in New York Times v. Sullivan, Richer, or any similarly situated person who is considered a public figure, would have to come forward with evidence of “actual malice” to win at trial, assuming a case ever gets to a jury.
The actual malice standard, which is often difficult to meet or exceed at a matter of law, might be compared to a form of character assassination for at least one statement “that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not,” the high court held.
As the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of The Press indicated, “it requires a public official in a defamation case challenging a statement to show that the speaker knew or strongly suspected the statement was false when they made it.”
Much information has come out since the November 2022 election in which Lake was the GOP standard-bearer for governor that purports to expose alleged widespread ballot irregularities in Maricopa County and elsewhere in the state.
“The lawsuit will now proceed to discovery, the formal process of exchanging information between attorneys about witnesses and evidence that could be presented before a jury,” the Arizona Republic added.
As a double-edged sword, the discovery process, in which documents surface and parties and others testify at depositions, could also wind up reflecting unfavorably on Maricopa officials with regard to how they conduct elections.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
