I’ve seen several memes on the #DNCFraudLawsuit such as

“Dismissed DNC Fraud Lawsuit is proof that fraudulent elections in the USA are okay!“

“Heart broken again! Just like at the convention! You’d think we’d learn to expect it!”

“This is officially the end of all justice.”

Negative memes like these are going around, but as an attorney, I have to say they draw a false conclusion based on honest emotions and frustration, but not based on the Order itself or the law. I was able to read the Order and I agree with it 98%. Here’s my down and dirty analysis.

The Order makes it pretty clear that the attorneys for plaintiffs were not well versed in Federal Pleading and Practice. Subject matter jurisdiction has technicalities that must be followed to the letter. As the court’s opinion states, “This Order therefore concerns only technical matters of pleading and subject-matter jurisdiction. To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC’s internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary. To the extent Plaintiffs have asserted specific causes of action grounded in specific factual allegations, it is this Court’s emphatic duty to measure Plaintiffs’ pleadings against existing legal standards. Having done so, and for the reasons that follow, the Court finds that the named Plaintiffs have not presented a case that is cognizable in federal court.” The essential point there is the distinction in the law between “general grievances” and “specific causes of action.”

State courts are courts of general subject matter jurisdiction. Federal courts are courts of limited subject matter jurisdiction and only have jurisdiction over certain limited issues. The lawsuit does not raise any violation of the Constitution or of Federal Statutes, therefore there is no direct Federal subject matter jurisdiction. The two other possible bridges for indirect Federal subject matter jurisdiction require either complete diversity between plaintiffs and defendants or partial diversity. Diversity means being citizens of different states. Since some of the plaintiff’s live in the same states as some of the defendants there is no complete diversity. (The court makes a jab at the wording used by the attorney’s in the complaint for using the terms “resident” when they should have used the term “citizen.” This shows that the attorney’s were using State court terminology in Federal court. If that was the only problem it could be easily corrected, but the court makes it clear they do not see that as the only problem or even the most significant problem.)

Since there is no violation of Federal law and no complete diversity of citizenship, the only way into Federal court is with the class action and partial diversity. If there is the assumption of partial diversity (“assumption” because they used residence not citizenship), even so, there is no class action subject matter jurisdiction since the representatives of the class have not pled the check-off points that are required. For a fraud claim, they must plead that they relied upon the DNC charter and the claims of impartiality before they donated to the DNC. The Court says the complaint does not include any declarations of reliance upon, or even knowledge of, the claim of DNC impartiality before any one of the representatives donated. The court says that there was a “boilerplate” declaration of reliance, but no sufficient factual content supporting it. Thus the complaint says they detrimentally relied, but does not declare such reliance with factual specificity, for example, and this is my example, such as “I heard on the radio that the DNC chairman said she must be impartial, therefore I donated because I believed she would b e impartial.”

Without establishing the factual basis for detrimental reliance a fraud case fails by what is called a “lack of standing” because they have not shown they have suffered a personal loss due to the fraud. In other words, they may have suffered a personal loss, but not one that was due to fraud because it looks like they donated before any issue or knowledge of the claim of impartiality arose. .

For clarification, the opinion says, “The act of donating to an organization does not, of itself, create a legally protected interest in the organization’s operations.” The legal theory is that the DNC is a not-for-profit organization and therefore donations are “gifts,” and a “gift” bestows no inherent legal obligation on the receiver of the “gift.” Only if the “gift” is given because of fraudulent inducement does any obligation arise, and the court says that such inducement was not sufficiently pled.

The fiduciary duty claims are most interesting to me because of my past experience with such claims for nonprofit public benefit corporations. Here, the question is one of membership status. And here the court specifically rejects the DNC’s arguments: “For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates ‘go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way,’ DE 54, at 36:22–24, the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle.” However, the court adds, “Nevertheless, it is apparent that these Plaintiffs cannot satisfy Lujan’s test, and therefore lack standing to assert Count V of the First Amended Complaint (DE 8).” That means that the grievance of the class of “registered Democrats” is too generalized to meet a very technical but necessary requirement for a class action claim. In other words, there are too many registered Democrats in the USA for the harm that is alleged to be specific to the class. Like the cases that would not allow claims against the unfair rules of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the court said the “claimed injury was too abstract and generalized to invoke the court’s jurisdiction.” In my view, this is the greyest area of the opinion in which the court is just saying this is a political football that we don’t want to touch if we don’t have to. The court is reduced to finding that “the harm done to the general public by corruption of the political process is not a sufficiently concrete, personalized injury to establish standing.”Â

The other claims regarding identity theft are minor in the big picture, and don”t have anything to do with the fairness or impartiality of the DNC. so I won’t comment on why the Court found they were not sufficiently pled.

You might also see legally ignorant and false headlines like “Court Admits DNC Rigged Primaries Against Sanders.” The case was at the stage of initial review. and so at this stage the court only looks at how the causes of action in the complaint are written, not whether their substance is true or false. So the court says that it “takes the allegations as true” for purposes of review at this stage. The court did not “admit” anything except in the hypothetical sense for comparing the allegation of “rigging” against the technicalities of pleading those allegations. The court found that even if the allegations of rigging were true, that the complaint was not written correctly enough to take the case to the next stage. In other words, the court said to go back to the drawing board and write a better complaint.

The attorney’s in this case show they are good people and have their hearts in the right place but were not experts in Federal pleading and practice and because of that their choice of plaintiffs was not exact or rigorous enough. A dismissal opinion of this kind is not an indictment against the courts, but is the court trying to educate the attorneys what is needed to make the lawsuit have legs. The dismissal “without prejudice” is an educational tool telling the attorneys what needs to be fixed to go forward. There is a slim chance that the complaint can be rewritten to address the points of deficiency enumerated in the Court’s opinion, but it would require attorneys who are experts in Federal practice and who have sufficient reputation to garner the benefit of the doubt in any “tie” of legal reasoning.

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