If you thought Postlegate had ground to a halt after Postle got unceremoniously junked by his lawyers, you thought wrong.
The latest update from the scandal that just keeps trucking is that Mike Postle has filed for an extension. He asked for more time to prepare on the contradictory grounds that he is “interviewing new counsel and needs guidance to answer the opposition,” and that he had only “just retained an organization specializing in internet-based First Amendment and defamation issues.” These quotes are from a February 24th hearing in which Postle begged this additional time of the court.
The result is that the hearings for Todd Witteles' and Veronica Brill's anti-SLAPP suit have been pushed back to the March 16th and March 18th respectively.
Todd Witteles, one of the more vocal defendants in the case tweeted an update regarding Postle's strategy. "Latest update with the Postle defamation suit," Witteles wrote. "We are in the process of responding to this."
Curiouser and curiouser
Mike Postle's attention to legal matters seems jarringly polarized. In fact several aspects of his legal strategy point towards either strategic genius far above the normies' ken or — perhaps more likely — a faulty crotch readout.
In the initial court case he attempted to defend himself. But he did so bad a job that he was assigned a lawyer. He then spent weeks trying to get that lawyer fired.
Then, after his dismissal from the main California-based case (and Marle Cordiero's Vegas-based one), he disappeared. Only a few sock-puppets and fan-girls remained to defend his good name on Twitter.
Then he hired some fancy lawyers and sued a chunk of poker's media. He had his eye on squeezing out a $360 million payday in damages. The lawsuit's target was more or less anyone who'd looked a the evidence and publicly assessed his play as suspicious. The full list of defendants included commentators like Veronica Brill, Joe Ingram, and Doug Polk. He also went after the deep pockets of Daniel Negreanu, ESPN, and 1,000 John and Jane Does to be named later among numerous others.
In early January, Brill's lawyer started asking about if anyone knew what had become of Mike Postle. He was ghosting his lawyers.
"Has anyone seen or heard from Mike Postle since December?" Marc J. Randazza, Brill's attourney tweeted. "His lawyers say that they have not heard from him at all."
It seemed that Postle had given up. Or was dodging his lawyer's accounts department. Within a few weeks, his own lawyer filed to drop him as a client. The court granted the request. So Postle had to start interviewing or face the anti-SLAPP filings of Brill and Witteles without counsel.
The next step
Now he's running interference. He's bought himself a couple of weeks to sort his strategy out, but it all seems a touch ad-libbed.
With the bizarre series of twists the story has taken, it seems entirely possible that the Postlegate documentary will have to hit the bargain DVD bin without a satisfying ending.
It shows no sign of letting up. Postle would have to overplay his hand to settle it. If he lets drop a fingerprinted, ballistically-unique smoking gun, we might get closure. He could also wrap things up if he finally manages to find a real hole in the mass of circumstantial evidence arrayed against him.
But almost any other outcome is likely to prove nothing to no-one and leave producer David Broome with a Making of a Murderer problem. How do you wrap up a mystery without a solution?
Image source: Twitter
