On August 6, the first court hearing was held in Ralph Nader’s case in Maine state court, suing the Democratic National Committee and many of its allied groups over the party’s coordinated campaign in 2004 to get Nader off the ballot in as many states as possible. See this story, which says the Maine state judge tentatively set a trial date of September 27.
Nader filed similar cases in Virginia and the District of Columbia in 2007, but they were consolidated into a single case in federal court, and then that case was dismissed by the U.S. Court of Appeals on statute of limitations grounds. So, no trial was ever held in the earlier case. But Maine has a six-year statute of limitations, and Maine was one of the states in which the Democrats tried to get Nader off the ballot, so Nader filed a new case in Maine state court last year.
In another development on Nader’s battle against Democratic Party actions against him in 2004, a District of Columbia court (not a federal court) that is hearing the case on whether Pennsylvania Democrats should be permitted to seize Nader’s funds from his bank account in Washington, D.C., recently asked both sides for more details about what happened in Pennsylvania in 2004. Specifically, the judges asked for information about a Pennsylvania indictment of state employees for working on the Democratic Party challenge to Nader’s 2004 Pennsylvania petition.