Birther attorney and conservative gadfly Larry Klayman is threatening a lawsuit if an Arizona group continues its attempts to recall Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The Associated Press reports that Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch, is working on behalf of the group "Citizens To Protect Fair Election Results" in an attempt to quash the Arpaio recall efforts. "Citizens To Protect Fair Election Results" is largely made up of tea partiers, according to Brahm Resnik of the Arizona Nightly News, some of whom also happen to be birthers.
The organizers of the recall cite Arpaio's failure to prosecute over 400 sex-crime cases and his harsh enforcement of immigration laws as their reasons for trying to sack him. Klayman, meanwhile, has given the organizers until March 2nd to shut down the recall, or he will sue.
Klayman, who served as the attorney for conspiracy theorist website World Net Daily in a suit over an Esquire birther parody, is in good company with Arpaio: The Sheriff once assembled a "posse" of birthers to investigate Obama's birth certificate.
"We need people like Sheriff Joe not to be intimidated by vigilantes," Klayman said in a press conference, adding that this qualifies as "a harassment of the sheriff, such that he can no longer do his job on behalf of the people."
Klayman went on to provide his reasoning for the suit, arguing that it's only been one month since the election, and Arizona law states that a recall petition can't be circulated until six months have passed.
As Resnik from the Nightly News puts it, though that is state law, "if Klayman had consulted the Secretary of State's election handbook, he would have seen the second sentence of the state law in big bold letters: 'The commencement of a subsequent term in the same office does not renew the six month period delaying the circulation of petitions.'" Since Arpaio is on his sixth term, this part of the law doesn't apply to him.
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