What has failed attorney Larry Klayman been up to this week?
First up, lying preacher Bradlee Dean revealed that he spent $77,000 on his failed, Klayman-represented lawsuit against Rachel Maddow. He finally gave up because the judge in the case refused to let Klayman transfer the lawsuit from a Washington, D.C., court to a federal court — a move being done for the sole reason of depriving Maddow of one avenue of defense — unless Dean paid $24,000 to Maddow’s lawyers to mount a new defense.
Presumably, Klayman got a good chunk of that $77,000. Seems that Dean has a case for getting some of that money back by suing Klayman for incompetent representation. Also, there’s the question of Dean got that $77,000 in the first place, given that he’s supposed to be a nonprofit preacher.
(Meanwhile, a Dean representative sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wonkette trying to claim that Dean’s reference to “the rod of correction” doesn’t mean that he “advocated the beating of children.” It also notes that Dean has retained an attorney in the case who is not Klayman.)
Then, Klayman lined up a new sucker — er, client. He’s now representing a group called Citizens To Protect Fair Election Results, which is trying to stop a recall campaign against Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.According to the Arizona Republic, Klayman has sent a cease-and-desist letter to recall organizers, claiming that “There are no valid reasons for this recall petition” because Arpaio was just re-elected and that it’s illegal anyway because Arizona prohibits the circulation of recall petitions against an official until he or she has held office for six months.
Just a couple of problems with that. First, legal experts (which Klayman is clearly not) agree that the recall prohibition limit doesn’t apply to incumbents (which Arpaio is).
Second, Klayman has shown no interest in giving President Obama the same post-election deference he demands for Arpaio. Two days before Obama was inaugurated, Klayman was ranting that “its time to legally remove the tyrant Obama from our body politic and cleanse the nation of his evil and destructive march to abolish our liberty and freedoms.”
Not only is Klayman an incompetent lawyer, it seems his moral standards are extremely flexible depending on who he’s going after.
Oh, needless to say, Bob Unruh’s WND article on the Arpaio recall petition fails to mention the conflict of interest that Klayman has also represented WND, nor does it note that Klayman is completely wrong about the petition being illegal.
UPDATE: The Phoenix New Times reports that Citizens To Protect Fair Election Results is headed by the leaders of the Surprise Tea Party, to whom WND’s Jerome Corsi gave a birther presentation that led to a request from the group to Arpaio to investigate Obama’s “eligibility” to be president. Funny how that goes around.