There's a hearing (by conference call) in the election contest today where Judge Bridges is considering briefs on the schedule for deposing Dean Logan and Bill Huennekens.

Some briefs that were filed for today's hearing (links at the end of the post) confirm that both the Democrats and King County Elections are dragging their heels in an appalling fashion to slow down the process as much as possible and to delay justice to the millions of Washingtonians who voted for Dino Rossi --

As was apparent in last week's news article, the Democrats have evolved a strategy of both acknowledging the problems with the election that caused a number of illegal votes to be counted in King County while countering that all of these illegal votes were balanced by other problems in King County that caused legitimate votes not to be counted.

In order to show the latter, the Dems have been asking for a large number of documents from King County elections, but as with the Republicans and the general public, King County hasn't been responsive to all of the Democrats' document requests either.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are eager to start deposing Logan and Huennekens, but two things are getting in their way. First, the King County Prosecutor, representing Logan and Huennekens, is arguing that the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee should only have to be deposed for one day each and that they should only be deposed by both the Republicans and Democrats at the same time. (i.e. they don't want to be deposed by the Republicans on one day and then by the Democrats on a later date). The second thing holding up the depositions is that the Democrats are arguing that they can't even start deposing Logan and Huennekens until they have all the documents that they've requested from King County Elections but that Logan and Huennekens haven't released yet. The Republicans argue that this is all nonsense, that the depositions should start ASAP but they can be recalled for follow-up questions if the Democrats learn anything new in discovery. Furthermore, many of the Democrats' document requests are irrelevant both to the depositions of Logan and Huennekens, not to mention the entire contest lawsuit.

Logan and Huennekens were originally set to be deposed on March 15/17. This was pushed back to March 28/31, now the Republicans are trying to get it set to April 1/5.

The net effect is that King County Elections are dragging out as long as possible the inevitable pain of having all of their smelly laundry opened up to public scrutiny, and the Democrats are dragging out as long as possible the time that their illegitimate governor gets to occupy the office, sign legislation and spend the people's money. A clear case of justice denied through delay.

Thanks to Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation for forwarding the three briefs, which I've posted here in PDF: Protective Order for Logan and Huennekens Depositions, Democrats' Reponse to Motion for Protective Order [65pp, 3MB] and Petitioners' Response to Motion for Protective Order.

[I've found some other gems buried in the exhibits to the Democrats' brief, which I'll post separately in a later post]