Coleman is said to be grilling and kicking back at his cabin. Franken is blissing out because he knows there’s nothing he can do now to affect the ruling.

Meanwhile, their helpmates sweat bullets. Franken aide Jess McIntosh is on tenterhooks until she knows the Supreme Court justices have gone home for the day. And Coleman sidekick Tom Erickson tells the Strib’s Pat Lopez, “I’m afraid to even go to a movie.”

Which doesn’t quite compute with Erickson’s announcement via Twitter Wednesday:

Tomorrow I depart on my first vacation in 4 1/2 years. And no, I am not going to Argentina.

Franken refused to be interviewed, Lopez notes, but she doesn’t directly quote Coleman either, so it’s not clear what he did to help out with the story.

Below, comments from the courthouse in St. Paul hosting the Senate trial that now shows Franken has a 312-vote lead.

Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, responding to a reporter after court adjourned today, about Coleman’s contention that his training of local officials was inadequate :

I’ll be interested to hear from the (election trial judges). … They appear not to have believed a word of it.

Coleman staffer Tom Erickson, approaching reporters after Ritchie finished speaking:

What did he have to say? “Nothing to see here — everything is fine”?

Franken attorney Marc Elias:

It is a sense of relief that it’s over, at a personal level.

Elias, in response to a reporter’s question:

I think the only way I’ll have a chance to talk to (U.S. Supreme Court) Justice (Antonin) Scalia about equal protection in a year is if we meet in a diner … in Bethesda (Md.).

Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg, responding to Pioneer Press reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger, who asked first “What did your client do wrong to lose votes in a trial he started?” and then “Sorry, Ben, do you have anything other than rhetoric to back that up?” after he claimed that counting more ballots would give his client a winning margin:

If you did the reporting and looked at where the ballots were from …

Stassen-Berger, after Ginsberg finished speaking to reporters:

You want me to do the research? Give me the numbers!

Ginsberg on Coleman’s whereabouts:

He had a previous engagement. He’ll be … around.

Election-contest trial Judge Denise Reilly, looking down the bench at her colleagues, Judges Elizabeth Hayden and Kurt Marden, after they again leaned their heads together to share whispers:

(Reilly didn’t say anything but continued to stare in their direction after the kibitzing session ended.)

Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, after opening the last absentee-ballot envelope:

That’s it.

“Minnesotans and folks across the country are fed up with Al Franken’s efforts to disenfranchise thousands of Minnesota voters, and the overwhelming response we received to making this information public is proof positive of that fact,” he says.

But not so fast, says Aaron Landry, an MN Publius blogger (and Franken fan) who works as IT Manager at a St. Paul design firm by day. He commented at MDE that there’s “no way that the amount of traffic they got was the cause of the website being down.”

Then he did some digging. His conclusion: “This stunt is a completely fabricated lie.“

Two of the four points Landry makes in his post:

2. Their website has been configured to point at the IP address “1.1.1.1,” which goes nowhere. This isn’t a mistake. They also set the “time to live” on that for only 600 seconds, which means when they choose to switch it back, most servers should only take 10 minutes to refresh. It’s an intentional move so they can manage their timing of the switchover. Most records like this have a much longer time to live. In short, they have configured their website to intentionally point at nothing. This does not happen by mistake and it is clear what they are doing.

[...]

4. As the Coleman for Senate website is being pointed at 1.1.1.1, which goes nowhere, they have no way of tracking how many “hits” they are getting. They had to have made up the “thousands of hits” number because it is technically impossible to track traffic they aren’t receiving.

I left messages on the office voicemail and cellphone of Coleman’s press officer, Luke Friedrich, and called and e-mailed his backup, Tom Erickson. Should they reply, I’ll post what they have to say. I’m also getting in touch with IT experts who can weigh in on Landry’s claim.

Update: Tony Webster, a Minneapolis web developer, explained to me that the IP address the Coleman campaign used prior to today’s “crash” (208.42.168.197) is responsive. Translation: “If the site was truly down, that IP wouldn’t be responsive. If it wasn’t, their story might have validity. In fact, I can see their last blog post today. The title is ‘Senate Trial: Every ballot has a story.’ If the site was down, I wouldn’t see that at all.”

He says he can also see that the campaign has a Google Analytics account.

“If they wanted to be transparent, they could release those logs and graphs,” he said. “Since it’s a third-party source, they can’t modify the data. If they changed that DNS [to 1.1.1.1] to mitigate a problem, you should see it.”

Update: I called Tim Barsness listed as the technical contact for the site. The provided phone number rang to Coleman’s campaign office; while Barsness was not available, the unidentified man who answered the phone would say little, except to inform me that the problem was being worked on as we spoke — and to correct me: “The crash happened yesterday.” That assertion sets off a red flag for Tony Webster: If that’s true, why does he see two entries dated today? He took a screen grab of how the Coleman site’s HTML displays on-screen, taken directly from the site’s server:

[click to enlarge]

Still no response to my multiple messages left with Coleman representatives at 2 pm this afternoon.

Related: ‘Crashgate’ reveals unprotected donor database on Coleman’s site

Watch Olsen’s video of the incident here. Larger video here.