Your Honor, please don’t sanction me because I never read that thing I signed my name to. I was just a conduit for these crazy people to get their case before your court. Also, it was kinda your fault, if you think about it, for not holding an evidentiary hearing. Further affiant sayeth not.
Or words to that effect.
Thus reads the affidavit filed by Michigan attorney Gregory J. Rohl in response to Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s motion for sanctions in the Michigan Kraken case. See, the counselor was just home fixing Thanksgiving dinner on November 25 when he got a call at 6:30 p.m. from “an associate who asked Rohl if he would assist in litigation involving election fraud in Michigan which was being spearheaded by Sidney Powell and Lin Wood.”
And instead of saying, “Gosh, can we maybe talk about this on Monday so I can have the weekend to read the filing and make comments before I agree to put my name on it,” he said GIDDYUP!
After Rohl “advised that he was not political and did not really care who won,” he was “thereafter forwarded a copy of the already prepared proposed Complaint with over 100 exhibits, the review of which took well over an hour.”
Over an hour, Your Honor! That’s like a whole 36 seconds per exhibit.
And then Rohl had a conference call “prior to fling” [sic] with the plaintiffs which “left him with the distinct impression that if true, there was some form of corruption of electoral processes in Michigan by either internal or external forces in Michigan that should be reviewed by a court of competent jurisdiction.”
So Rohl agreed to “serve as a conduit for the pleadings and essentially ‘hold the fort’ until Sidney Powell’s Pro Hac Vice application was accepted by the Court.” At 11:56 p.m., just four minutes before the deadline, Rohl’s secretary filed the complaint with his name on it as one of two local counsels.
The next day “media attention was significant in pointing out various spelling errors and formatting issues,” which is a nice way of saying that it noticed an affidavit purporting to prove voter fraud in Edison County, Michigan, a place which does not exist. (Probably should have given this “Decleration” [sic] 47 or even 49 seconds review, huh?)
Also, there were typos.
And Sidney Powell never did file for pro hac vice admission. But, you know, po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
Mistakes were made. But the important thing is that he just put his name on this case, he didn’t have anything to do with it. Particularly after “Rohl’s limited involvement was seriously further undermined once Judge [Linda] Parker saw fit to waive oral argument and otherwise not order any evidentiary hearings.” (Does he mean “underline?”) How can a lawyer be presumed to know the strength or weakness of his own case if the court refuses to even air it in open court?
Anyway! Gregory Rohl would be most gratified if the court would acknowledge that he was just acting as a good Samaritan whose “only goal was to secure Court review of the alleged election fraud issues raised in the complaint.” So please don’t take away his license to practice law again for deficiencies in this complaint which he put his name on.
Well … good luck with that one.
King v. Whitmer, Docket [Court Listener]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.