In 2021, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow used California’s anti-SLAPP law to kill a defamation suit against her by San Diego-based One America News.
Now former OAN anchor Christina Bobb is citing Arizona’s anti-SLAPP law in hopes of escaping criminal prosecution in the fake electors case.
On July 1, Bobb filed a motion to dismiss her indictment in the Arizona case. She’s piggybacking a similar motion by state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a fellow defendant.
Former Chapman University law professor John Eastman also is asking an Arizona judge to erase his charges, citing the state’s anti-SLAPP law meant to protect people from retaliation for exercising their free speech and other rights.
And taking a page from Donald Trump’s legal strategy, former San Diegan Bobb is seeking to delay progress in her Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, a federal civil matter seeking $1.6 billion.
On Monday, Dominion lawyers filed arguments against Bobb’s effort to delay a deposition and discovery by 120 days — and possibly much longer.
On June 24, Bobb attorney William C. Haggerty told a Washington, D.C., court that the San Diego State University MBA “is faced with a substantial dilemma — either fully defend this civil action by waiving her Fifth Amendment rights and responding to discovery, thereby potentially jeopardizing her criminal defense, or invoke her Fifth Amendment privilege and consequently undermine her prospects in this civil action.”
Haggerty said this “predicament” puts Bobb in “the untenable position of having to choose between jeopardizing her criminal case or jeopardizing her defense in [the Dominion defamation] case.”
But Dominion lawyer Laranda Walker said in a rebuttal that Bobb seeks a complete stay of all further discovery in her case, at least for 120 days but “in reality” pending resolution of the Arizona charges.
“Bobb does so despite being served with Dominion’s requests some 14 months ago, having produced zero documents to date,” said the voting tech company.
“Ms. Bobb’s right against self-incrimination can be protected with significantly narrower relief than the requested stay, avoiding substantial prejudice to Dominion.”
Walker noted that Bobb argues that “factual parallels” and a “close relationship” exist between the civil and criminal cases.
“In reality, however, overlap between the two cases is limited at best,” she said. “The name ‘Dominion’ appears nowhere in the Arizona indictment. Nor does the indictment include an allegation related to defamation.”
Walker added: “Only one small section of the indictment mentions voting machines in Maricopa County, which recounts efforts in December 2020 by Rudy Giuliani and others — but not Bobb — to gain access to Maricopa County’s voting machines and ballots. … The Arizona indictment does not charge or allege any facts related to the sham audit that began in Maricopa County in April 2021.
“Nor, most crucially, does the Arizona indictment refer, even obliquely, to the on-air statements [of alleged vote-rigging] made by Ms. Bobb and others at OAN that are the crux of Dominion’s claims against the civil co-defendants.”
In his June 24 request of D.C. federal Judge Carl J. Nichols, Bobb attorney Thomas Jacobs signaled in the Dominion case that he would file an anti-SLAPP motion on her behalf in the Arizona case. He did so a week later.
“The hearing on the anti-SLAPP motion will likely be held by September 2024 and, if successful, result in Ms. Bobb’s dismissal from the criminal case,” he told the D.C. court.
He opposed any Dominion deposition of Bobb because it “could and likely would impair Ms. Bobb’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, extend criminal discovery beyond the limits set forth by Arizona law, potentially expose Ms. Bobb’s theory to the prosecution in advance of trial, and otherwise prejudice her criminal case.”
Thomas didn’t respond to my queries about her motion to be dropped from the Arizona criminal case.
But Tim La Sota, an attorney for state Sen. Hoffman, in his own bid to kill the charges, called the prosecution “politics by other means.”
La Sota alleged “an effort by an overtly partisan elected attorney general to shame and punish her political opponents and critics for exercising their constitutional rights.”
Former Trump lawyer Bobb hopes her anti-SLAPP motion in Arizona succeeds like the one by Maddow, liberal MSNBC’s top-rated host, in California.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2021 said a San Diego federal judge was right to throw out OAN’s $10 million defamation suit against Maddow.
