By Robert Willmann
After being sanctioned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in June 2021 for violating the duty of candor and the court’s local rules, attorney Marc Elias left the Perkins & Coie law firm in Washington D.C. by announcement on 22 August 2021. Ten other partners and three attorneys left at the same time. Special counsel John Durham indicted one member of that law firm (Michael Sussmann) on 16 September 2021 in connection with his investigation regarding “the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns ….” [1] After forming a new law firm called the Elias Law Group on 2 September 2021, Elias has surfaced in the race for Virginia governor between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin.
The new Elias firm filed a lawsuit for the Democratic Party of Virginia in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia on 22 October 2021. The case is against the Post Office through Frank Veal, in his official capacity as the South Atlantic Division Manager for the United States Postal Service, and Gerald Roane, in his official capacity as Virginia District Manager of the United States Postal Service. I have not included the original filed complaint because it is basically blah blah blah.
The Virginia Democratic Party (VDM) on 25 October requested a temporary restraining order. The Post Office filed a memorandum in opposition to a restraining order. On 27 October, the day of the hearing, the parties announced an agreed order.
Interesting, but what are they suing about?
JME,
The Virginia Democratic Party is claiming that the Postal Service is delivering and processing mail for the election too slowly, and that this creates an “undue burden on the right to vote”. An interpretation of the constitution says that voting is a “fundamental right”. The allegation is that if the mail is processed and delivered slowly, a person might not get an application for an absentee ballot in to the election administrator on time, the voter will have less time to consider an absentee ballot received by mail, and that an absentee ballot mailed to the election administrator may not get there by the deadline.
The Virginia Democratic Party (VDP) is also asserting that election-related mail is sitting around in Albemarle, James City, and Portsmouth Counties, and that it should be promptly processed and delivered.
The Post Office says the VDP is relying on second-hand information, and there is no slowness problem in processing election mail.
How can the court agree to this since there hasn’t been harm to anyone as the election hasn’t happen yet? It looks like another sue and settle lawsuit to give legal cover to the theft of yet another election. I forsee tray upon tray with green tag 191 affixed to them showing up after the in person ballots show a huge loss for McCauliffe who wins with the Covid by mail voter!
Where’s the Repubican Party of VA in this? Too busy chanting Let’s Go Brandon to get a lawyer into court to block this obvious fraud from happening?
1) I sent a rent payment in August from the UPSPS Main Post Office on Brook Road in Richmond, Virginia to my apartment complex on Tobacco Row in Shockoe Bottom, a distance of 3 miles. The stamped envelope with check enclosed took three weeks too deliver. I had to subsequently write another check to the apartment owners to avoid a late-payment charge because off the “late delivery”. 2) A fried from New Canaan, Connecticut sent me a card in September, which was subsequently returned to him in New Canaan after four weeks, stamped “Undeliverable – Addressee Unknown”. We are now living in the terd world.
Shako,
I have had both problems in the past 4 decades of using the mail, but everything else tends to be 3 days or less. Does my annecdote of 40 decades of good mail service overide two annecdotes of poor service?
Same type slowdown happens to my daughter in Seattle.
Yet my rural post office has no such problems, all mail has been delivered promptly. But then here in the sticks we never needed any of those high-speed mail sorting machines that got scrapped in the big cities.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10156749/Mother-skirt-wearing-teen-raped-female-classmate-says-identifies-male.html
We’ll see how the vote counters decide the outcome of the ballot count.
Sniffing good things for VA out here in Calif.- very early returns: 54% GOP votes in and 44% Dem votes in so far – 44% total votes of all registered voters. But we already know what happened in the wee small hours of the morning.
But a bracing start – is VA all mail in now? Or are their polling places where votes will still need to be delivered in order to be counted? Fingers crossed.