Castor
PHILADELPHIA – A federal judge has again tossed legal malpractice claims by a group that challenged how federal elections are conducted but ended up unhappy with its choice of lawyers, one of whom is a former Pennsylvania attorney general.
Philadelphia judge Chad Kenney on Wednesday dismissed the latest complaint filed by United Sovereign Americans, apparently now know as Unite 4 Freedom. This time he did so with prejudice, meaning the group can’t re-style its allegations in an amended complaint.
Unite 4 Freedom had touted its lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Texas, Maryland and elsewhere as “historic” but judges like Daryl Bloom of Harrisburg threw them out, ruling the group and its named plaintiffs lacked standing to bring them.
So Unite sued its lawyers this year, accusing Castor of creating a losing strategy for the election cases and failing to complete work on them while billing $417,000. Kenney granted the dismissal motion of Castor and the firm van der Veen, Hartshorn, Levin & Lindheim on May 29 but allowed the nonprofit to try again with an amended complaint.
Though plaintiffs aren’t held to an evidentiary burden at this stage of litigation, they must show that discovery will reveal evidence of necessary elements of their claims to survive a motion to dismiss, Kenney wrote.
“For the second time, Plaintiff has failed to do so with respect to actual loss and, what’s more, Plaintiff appears to disclaim that it ever needs to plead any facts demonstrating actual loss,” he added.
Castor is a former Montgomery County district attorney who became interim state attorney general for two weeks in August 2016 when then-AG Kathleen Kane resigned following a criminal conviction of perjury. He also represented President Donald Trump during an impeachment proceeding.
Unite hired him when it brought suit against federal and Pennsylvania officials in 2024, alleging violations of the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act. It claimed data showed errors in Pennsylvania’s federal voter rolls and included plaintiffs who claimed their votes were not counted.
One plaintiff, a Constitution Party candidate for U.S. Senate, couldn’t show a “particularized” injury, chief U.S. magistrate judge Bloom found. Instead, the complaint only made general claims that the integrity of elections in Pennsylvania would be undermined if officials weren’t forced to address USA’s concerns.
USA alleged 9,000 more votes were counted than voters who voted, outside of an error rate laid out in the HAVA. It did not challenge the 2022 results and instead only sought to prevent any violations in the future.
USA’s suit against Castor was called “vague” by Judge Kenney, who said there are insufficient facts to meet its theory of legal malpractice.
“While Plaintiff describes purported negligent conduct that allegedly caused the loss of litigating its claims on the merits, Plaintiff failed to plead any facts demonstrating that other competent attorneys would have successfully propelled the underlying cases to their merits or reached a favorable outcome,” Kenney wrote in May.
