A Maricopa County, Arizona judge on Thursday rejected three of Kari Lake’s witnesses and their testimonies at the Republican’s third trial related to her 2022 defeat in Arizona’s gubernatorial race.
As RawStory reports, Lake’s latest lawsuit’s trial kicked off with a Thursday hearing, for which her attorney, Brian Blehm, sought to have the state release ballot envelopes signed by about 1.3 million early voters.
Superior Court Judge John Hannah, however, shook up those plans when he deemed two of Lake’s witnesses — Erich Speckin, a forensic document analyst, and Chris Handsel, a software consultant — irrelevant to the trial. He then homed in on witness Shelby Busch, a participant in the Cyber Ninjas computer security firm’s voting audit, whom Hannah singled out as an especially irrelevant witness.
“On this one, I’m inclined to go a step further because she’s so obviously — she’s a medical office manager,” Hannah said. “I mean, she’s so obviously unqualified that I kind of find a need to make a finding about that, as well as that her testimony is irrelevant. I mean, she’s not even in the ballpark.” Though Blehm countered that Busch had a lot of experience “under her belt as someone who does investigations into elections,” including her work with the now-defunct Cyber Ninjas, Hannah was not impressed. He swiftly granted the motion to exclude Busch from the batch.
Watch below, via Raw Story:
