‘Plenty of perjury’: MAGA lawyer files Georgia elections lawsuit with glaring typo

The Trump campaign once touted the legal minds behind its effort to challenge the legitimate election results as an “elite strike force,” but the defeats and blunders keep piling up. Of nearly 60 lawsuits filed across the country by the campaign and its allies, most all have been dropped, and none have proved a single instance of voter fraud.

True to form, on Friday a pro-Trump lawyer named L. Lin Wood, who spearheaded attempts to overturn Georgia’s president election results, lodged a new suit on similar lines, signing off his complaint that it he made his claims under “plenty of perjury,” rather penalty of perjury.

“I declare and verify under plenty of perjury that the facts contained in the foregoing Verified Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief are true and correct,” Mr Wood, an accomplished libel attorney with a large conservative following online, wrote in his complaint.

The federal lawsuit challenges Georgia’s voting procedures as unlawful. A March court settlement altered the minutiae of the state’s voting rules following a lawsuit from the Democratic Party alleging various steps related to mail-in ballots and signature matching were disenfranchising minority voters. Mr Wood’s complaint seeks to halt January’s Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which will continue using these legally certified changes. In the runoffs, two Georgia Republicans, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are vulnerable.

Earlier in December, a federal appeals court rejected a similar suit from Mr Wood relating to the presidential contest. The same court rejected another Georgia suit from Mr Wood and Sidney Powell, a former Trump campaign attorney, seeking to examine voting machines. The pair alleged as part of an unfounded conspiracy theory that voting machines flipped votes intended for Mr. Trump.

Both Mr Wood and Ms Powell are prominent members of the “Stop the Steal” movement, which alleges without real evidence that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump. The state of Georgia did three separate recounts and declared Mr Biden the winner, and found no evidence of a stolen election.

The duo’s previous efforts have been rife with errors. One of their suits was amended after it initially alleged voting machines flipped votes intended for Mr Biden and improperly awarded them to Mr Trump.

Ms Powell, who proclaimed her set of election lawsuits across the country would unleash what she called “the Kraken,” were filled instead with numerous errors and bizarre oversights, including referencing a nonexistent county in Michigan, filing a Wisconsin lawsuit seeking data on other states, and misspelling the world “district” twice in the opening lines of a filing. 

The Trump campaign abruptly separated itself from Ms Powell and her increasingly conspiratorial claims in late November.

The president also reportedly reached out to Mr Wood in early December and told him to “knock it off,” after encouraging Republicans not to vote in the runoff elections because they were “rigged,” a message that is both unfounded in fact and dangerous politically amid runoff elections that could decide who controls the US Senate.  

On 14 December, the Electoral College formally certified president-elect Biden’s victory, though vote totals and officials from both parties have for weeks confirmed his victory was clear, legitimate, and free of any meaningful irregularities.