Roy Moore wants judge who ruled against him removed from case

Former judge and Senate candidate Roy Moore is calling for a federal judge who ruled against him in his lawsuit against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen to be removed from the case, saying the judge disrespected him by not referring to him as “Chief Justice.”

In a filing on Tuesday, Moore’s lawyer, Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman, asked for U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan to resign from the case and for Hogan’s ruling, which granted Cohen’s request to transfer the case from Washington, D.C., to New York, to be reconsidered.

{mosads}“To be honest and straightforward, given the manner in which this Court appeared to disrespect and disparage Plaintiff Moore at the outset of the hearing over whether he could still be referred to as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court – indeed a public figure such as a judge never loses his or her title — and then at the conclusion of the hearing read from an apparently pre-prepared order that was obviously penned even before the Court heard oral argument, it would appear that the Court not only prejudged Defendants’ motion to transfer, but also harbored extra-judicial bias toward Chief Justice Moore,” the motion states.

Klayman also claimed Hogan misinterpreted a precedent cited by Cohen’s attorneys.

Hogan agreed to Cohen’s request in April. Moore sued Cohen, Showtime and CBS over his appearance on Cohen’s show “Who is America?” which depicts a character played by Cohen using a “pedophile detector,” which Moore appeared to set off. Moore narrowly lost to Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) in a 2017 special election to replace then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions amid allegations by several women that Moore had made inappropriate advances on them when they were teenagers. Moore has denied all the allegations.