Sidney Powell’s Wisconsin ‘Kraken’ Election Suit Dismissed

(Bloomberg) -- A federal judge in Wisconsin became the latest to dismiss a lawsuit brought by ex-Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell on behalf of disgruntled Republican voters who allege Democrats stole the election through a vast and intricate international conspiracy.

U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper in Milwaukee said in a ruling Wednesday evening that decertifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the battleground state as requested by Powell is “outside the limits” of both the Constitution and the court’s oath to uphold the law.

“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country,” the judge wrote. “One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so. After a week of sometimes odd and often harried litigation, the court is no closer to answering the ‘why.’ But this federal court has no authority or jurisdiction to grant the relief the remaining plaintiff seeks.”

The case is one of four Powell brought seeking to overturn election results in states Biden won, alleging hundreds of Democratic election workers conspired to flip votes with help from corrupt voting machines allegedly infiltrated by foreign agents. When Powell announced the suits last month, she said she was “releasing the Kraken,” a reference to a mythical sea monster depicted in the 1981 fantasy film “Clash of the Titans.”

Her Arizona case was dismissed earlier Wednesday, while her suit in Georgia suffered a similar fate. A case in Michigan is pending.

Powell on Thursday filed a notice of appeal in Wisconsin and said in an email that she’s “fast-tracking” her fight to the the U.S. Supreme Court, where President Donald Trump has said he hopes to reverse Biden’s win through a similar long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas this week.

“No surprise,” Powell said of the ruling in Wisconsin by Pepper, a Barack Obama appointee. “Just disappointed in the lack of courage of so many federal judges to deal with reality and stop the fraud.”

The dismissal was requested by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, who argued the complaint was “rampant with wild speculation and conspiratorial conclusions, and simply without any basis in law or fact.”

Georgia officials mocked Powell’s Kraken reference, saying her litigation belongs in the same realm of fantasy. When a federal judge in Michigan denied her motion for an injunction against state officials, her case was deemed to be “conjecture and speculation.”

Trump’s campaign has a separate suit in Wisconsin federal court challenging mail-in voting in the state, which Biden won by around 20,000 votes.

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