[Arizona] Lake lawyers say her claims about Richer were ‘hyperbole’

Maricopa County Recorder Richer filed a defamation lawsuit against Kari Lake for her remarks made regarding the 2022 election. During speeches Lake has claimed Richer purposely had ballots printed to the wrong size and purposely injected illegal ballots.


Lake wants the suit dismissed. In the opening hearing Lake's lawyers are claiming her statements were just her opinion but are backed by facts therefore protected under the freedom speech.
"Attorneys for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake argued in court on Tuesday that a judge should dismiss Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s defamation lawsuit against her, saying that Lake’s claims were “rhetorical hyperbole” and not meant to be taken as facts.

When Lake said that Richer was somehow involved in the illegal injection of bogus ballots or that he “sabotaged” the election, those statements weren’t meant to be taken as facts, Wright said.
“Those are her opinions about the facts,” Wright told the court.
For example, Lake told her followers during a Jan. 29 “Save Arizona Rally” that Richer and Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates intentionally printed incorrectly sized ballot images on Election Day 2022 as a form of “sabotage” because they knew that the majority of in-person voters that day would be Republicans supporting Lake, and that the incorrectly-sized ballots would cause the tabulators to reject those ballots.
This was one of the claims that judges in Arizona trial, appeals and the state Supreme Court threw out during Lake’s election challenge cases.

While ballot printing issues caused significant delays and frustration at the polls in Maricopa County in 2022, ballots that were rejected by the tabulators were later counted.


Here again is a person who wants things tossed because they believe what they say are true.
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PHOENIX — Kari Lake’s lawyers told a judge Tuesday a defamation suit against her should be thrown out because she believes her statements about injected ballots and sabotaged voting machines in the 2022 election she lost are true.


imo, Lake is not to be trusted then when she gives speeches. Who knows when it is an opinion or stating facts. And she wants to be our Senator. Good luck with that.

In other words she wants to be able to defame anyone she wants with zero consequences. Sounds fair doesn't it?

It's rather sad imo that all the punishments for lying gratuitously to the voters are only getting applied by private citizens via the civil courts. No criminal liability for the sort of deception that would see you jailed if it involved peoples money, but zero consequences when all you steal is their vote. No wonder politicians lie so frequently to deceive people. Sad!

mike2810 said:

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imo, Lake is not to be trusted then when she gives speeches. Who knows when it is an opinion or stating facts. And she wants to be our Senator. Good luck with that.

Click to expand...

Going from John McCain (with whom I disagreed most of the time, but I had little reason to question his honesty) to Kari Lake...ugh.

Lake's stance also seems to be, if one believes what they say is true it is not a lie.

Lake has yet to provide any "facts" to back up her alleged opinion.
- Yes there were printer problems that caused some delays at some polling places till correct. Lake has not proved it was intentional. Lake also tends to dismiss that the ballots that had issues were still counted.

There is no way would I vote for her to be one of our Senators. She can't even acknowledge she lost the governor race.

The dismissal request by Lake was turned down. The lawsuit is going to trial

:
The Court noted that the instances of Lake's statements about Richer alleging fraud were too numerous to mention in the Order, but he cited two particularly egregious examples of statements Lake made at her January 9, 2023 'Save Arizona Rally,' where she said:

"Richer and Gates intentionally printed the wrong image on the ballot on Election Day so those ballots would intentionally be spit out of the tabulators ... Well, these guys are really, really terrible at running elections but I found out they're really good at lying."

Her second statement at the same event claimed that she had "whistleblowers" who claimed that 300,000 illegal ballots were counted in her race.

Lake's attorneys argued that her statements were not intentional lies made with malice, just "examples of imaginative expression or rhetorical hyperbole." The judge didn't buy it. The trial court denied her motion to dismiss based on these two statements alone:

"In the Court's view, Defendant Lake's statements are provably false under prevailing Arizona law." The court then ordered the parties to agree on a trial date and inform the court of that trial schedule by January 19, 2024.