Guest post: Cheap, Dishonest, and Incompetent

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on SCOTUS to Trump: No.

OMG, I just came across the Most Trump Thing, Ever.

Remember that story a while ago about how Trump’s attorneys mistakenly filed a case in the Court of Federal Claims, instead of the District Court for the Western District of Michigan? The next day, they filed in Michigan, and the Federal Claims court dismissed the action there.

Well, apparently, Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to the Clerk of the Federal Claims court requesting a refund of their $400 filing fee, on the grounds that the federal courts’ electronic filing system had screwed up and caused the error.

Yes, the campaign that has raised many millions of dollars and wasted many hours of lawyer time on stupid court cases was demanding a $400 refund. So check off CHEAP on your bingo cards.

Well, the clerk referred the request to the judge, who issued an order denying the request. As the judge pointed out, the campaign’s claim of a screw-up by the court’s computers was nonsense, and this was clearly a screw-up by the attorney or his or her staff:

For whatever reason (and no good one is apparent to the Court), Plaintiffs have chosen not to be candid about what led them to file their complaint initially in this Court. But so far as the Court can tell, there was no “electronic error” involved. Rather, it was human error.

Plaintiffs’ counsel or a member of his staff mistakenly filed the complaint with this court rather than with the Western District of Michigan.

So that’s the DISHONEST space taken care of.

The judge goes on to note that actually, it is possible to seek a refund of filing fees paid inadvertently due to human error on the part of the filer, so the campaign might have gotten their $400 back if they’d simply come clean about it, but now that they’ve lied, forget it. So there’s INCOMPETENT.

In other words, the Trump legal team, having made a mistake (and I’m just going to give them a pass on the initial screw-up — these things happen), then lied about what happened in an attempt to get a lousy $400 back, and ended up with a federal judge calling them dishonest and giving them nothing. (In nice, federal-judge-speak.)

That is just a magnificent little illustration of the man himself. Cheap, Dishonest, and Incompetent.

Happy Biden Wins Again Day, everyone!

2 Responses to “Guest post: Cheap, Dishonest, and Incompetent”