Failed lawyer Larry Klayman — remember him? — just can’t stop filing nuisance lawsuits designed more for generate publicity and assuage his own delusions of grandeur than anything resembling justice (heck, he even threatened to sue us), and one of the main beneficiaries of those lawsuits has been former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. We’ve previously caught Klayman boasting about one nuisance lawsuit on Arpaio’s behalf, in which he claimed that the New York Times committed “defamation per se” against Arpaio (since he offered no evidence of actual defamation). WorldNetDaily — a onetime Klayman client and longtime cheerleader which published a column by him for years — touted a 2018 Klayman lawsuit he filed against CNN and Rolling Stone seeking $300 million for calling Arpaio a “felon” when his conviction on contempt of court charges was a misdemeanor; the lawsuit was unsurprisingly thrown out of court, WND gave Klayman space to whine about it.
Well, Klayman is trying that very same gambit again in an even more specious and publicity-seeking lawsuit, and WND’s Bob Unruh was there to serve as his PR agent in a July 9 article:
Joe Arpaio, who for years was known as “America’s toughest sheriff” for having the inmates in his Maricopa, Arizona, County jails do community betterment projects while behind bars, is suing Joe Biden for falsely characterizing him as a convicted “felon.”
The case is being handled by Larry Klayman in the Circuit Court of the 13th Judicial Circuit in Hillsborough County, Florida.
The false characterization came in an ad that Biden’s campaign for the White House created and released to the public.
“I will not stand by and allow my great friend and client, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, to be smeared and defamed by a dishonest president and his Democrat henchmen simply to harm Trump’s presidential election prospects,” explained Klayman, who has founded watchdog organizations Judicial Watch and FreedomWatchUSA.
It wasn’t until the 17th paragraph of his article — which included a lengthy recounting of his sheriff career — that Unruh finally got around to mentioning the issue at hand:
The complaint charges that last month, the Biden campaign’s “Official Rapid Response Page” on Twitter, @BidenHQ, posted a video with the caption “Trump trae al escenario a Joe Arpaio, un criminal convicto que fue perdonado por Trump después de que perfiló racialmente y abusó de inmigrantes.”
The complaint notes, “This is translated into the following: Trump brings to the stage Joe Arpaio, a convicted felon who was pardoned by Trump after he racially profiled and abused immigrants.”
Actually, not so much. As a real news organization reported, “criminal convicto” is more generally translated as “convicted criminal.” Unruh offered no evidence that Klayman justified his interpretation of the term. He then committed another journalistic failure in his final paragraph:
A receptionist at the White House switchboard, 202-456-1414, contacted by WND for a comment from a media officer, first grilled the reporter on what WND meant, and where it was located. Then she instructed that she had no one available to comment.
But the video was put out by Biden’s campaign, not the White House, meaning that Unruh wasted his time trying to get a response from someone who was not involved in it.
Unruh failed to mention Klayman’s previous failed lawsuits on Arpaio’s behalf, nor did he ask where Arpaio is getting all this money to waste on a dubious lawyer to filed nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. He also didn’t ask why Klayman fiiled his lawsuit in Florida when neither Biden nor Klayman reside there.