The lawyer for failed Republican US senate candidate and accused child molester Roy Moore says he’s too busy to represent him right now. Moore is the plaintiff in an ongoing civil case against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for defamation, emotional distress, and fraud.
“Plaintiffs need the additional time of 14 days because Plaintiffs’ counsel’s office is facing a sudden unforeseen influx of urgent client matters,” says a court filing submitted Thursday by Moore’s attorney, conservative activist Larry Klayman. It went on to list those urgent matters:
They include (1) the representation of two persons before the Mueller grand jury in the District of Columbia, (2) the representation of a client who needs to file for immediate injunctive relief after being removed from Twitter and Facebook, threatening her livelihood and (3) the representation of Christian client who is in federal lockup in the Federal Detention Center in Terre Haute, Indiana and whose life has been threatened by Muslim inmates, who have already murdered another inmate, and for which an FBI investigation has been initiated and is underway.
One of Klayman’s two clients mixed up in the Mueller investigation is conspiracy theorist and far-right commentator Jerome Corsi. Client number two is far-right political activist Laura Loomer, who chained herself to the front door of Twitter’s New York City offices this week to protest her ban from the messaging platform. Client number three appears to be Schaeffer Cox, an Alaska militia leader serving a 310-month prison sentence for his part in a 2012 conspiracy to murder federal officials.
“It’s just a question of priorities right now,” Klayman told Quartz, adding that yesterday’s filing was “a routine motion for an extension of time, that’s all.”
Moore initiated the $95 million lawsuit against Baron Cohen, Showtime, and CBS in September, claiming Baron Cohen duped him into appearing on the show Who is America? and “falsely portrayed [Moore] as a sex offender and pedophile,” according to court papers.
During Moore’s unsuccessful 2017 senate run, he was accused of having pursued sexual relationships with children as young as 14 while he was a prosecutor in his 30s. Moore has denied the allegations. A July 29 broadcast featured Baron Cohen disguised as a fictional Israeli anti-terrorism expert with a supposed “pedophile detector” that went off every time it got close to Moore.
Klayman claimed Baron Cohen’s legal team was trying to get the case moved to New York. “They think they’ll come up with a leftist judge there that’ll help them…but since judge Moore was interviewed in Washington, DC and all the events took place in Washington, DC, the case belongs there,” Klayman continued. “It’s a simple case of forum shopping.”
Klayman, who was a Justice Department lawyer during the Reagan administration, is a so-called “birther” who has said he believes president Barack Obama was in fact born in Kenya. He has sued Hillary Clinton, George Soros, the NSA, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and his own mother, Shirley Feinberg. (Klayman later told ABC News that the lawsuit, which involved $50,000 in medical expenses for his grandmother, was “essentially a case against my stepfather” and that his mom was only included “because legally she was next of kin.”) The Southern Poverty Law Center includes Klayman in its “extremist files.”
If Klayman’s motion is granted, the Moore case will resume sometime after Dec. 12.