Judge orders pro-Trump attorneys who brought frivolous election fraud case to pay more than $180,000 to defendants they sued

Washington (CNN) Two lawyers who went to court to claim voter fraud after the 2020 election must pay nearly $180,000 to the defendants they sued, a federal magistrate judge ordered Monday, saying their lawsuit aimed to “manipulate gullible members of the public and foment public unrest.”

The order from Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter of the US District Court in Colorado adds to the federal judiciary’s condemnations of attempts by attorneys supporting then-President Donald Trump to use the courts to vet right-wing conspiracies in the days after the presidential election.
Attorneys Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker will have to pay attorneys fees of $50,000 to Facebook (now Meta), about $63,000 to Dominion Voting Systems, about $63,000 to the non-profit Center for Tech and Civic Life, more than $6,000 to the state of Pennsylvania and nearly $5,000 to the state of Michigan.
“They need to take responsibility for their misconduct,” Neureiter wrote in his order, adding that the lawsuit defamed the defendants.
He continued: “I believe that rather than a legitimate use of the legal system to seek redress for redressable grievances, this lawsuit has been used to manipulate gullible members of the public and foment public unrest. To that extent, this lawsuit has been an abuse of the legal system and an interference with the machinery of government. For all these reasons, I feel that a significant sanctions award is merited.”
The lawsuit from late December 2020 was an attempt to create a class action challenge to the election on behalf of American voters, including eight named plaintiffs. Neureiter previously wrote a scathing 68-page opinion condemning the post-election lawsuit.
close dialog
The plaintiffs had no lawyers or experts that were able to support their claims of switched votes and government conspiracies, the judge noted, calling the lawsuit itself “one enormous conspiracy theory.”
Neureiter’s earlier ruling was the first major consequence in federal court to befall lawyers and litigants who pushed Trump’s attempt to undermine the 2020 election result in court. Other courts are still considering penalties for other lawyers involved in the failed pro-Trump lawsuits.
In August, a federal judge in Michigan sanctioned pro-Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, as well as several other attorneys, ordering them to reimburse the attorneys’ fees that the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials paid in seeking the sanctions. The judge said the lawyers, who worked on Trump-aligned lawsuits seeking to challenge election results, had “engaged in litigation practices” that were “abusive and, in turn, sanctionable.”

George Conway: Why Trump had to hire this legal odd couple

This is what happens when you don’t pay your legal bills.

President Trump, whose businesses and now campaign have left a long trail of unpaid bills behind them, has never discriminated when it comes to stiffing people who work for him. That includes lawyers — which is part of the reason he found the need to make some curious last-minute tweaks to his team, announcing the addition of the legal odd couple of Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth W. Starr.

​The president has consistently encountered difficulty in hiring good lawyers to defend him. In 2017, after Robert S. Mueller III became special counsel, Trump couldn’t find a high-end law firm that would take him as a client. His reputation for nonpayment preceded him: One major Manhattan firm I know had once been forced to eat bills for millions in bond work it once did for Trump. No doubt other members of the legal community knew of other examples.

Of course, being cheap wasn’t the only reason Trump struck out among the nation’s legal elite. There was the fact that he would be an erratic client who’d never take reasonable direction — direction as in shut up and stop tweeting. Firms also understood that taking on Trump would kill their recruiting efforts: Top law students of varying political stripes who might be willing, even eager, to join a firm that provides pro bono representation to murderers on death row, want nothing to do with Trump.

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr testifies before the House Judiciary Committee during Bill Clinton's impeachment inquiry in November 1998. (Luke Frazza/AFP via Getty Images)
Independent counsel Kenneth Starr testifies before the House Judiciary Committee during Bill Clinton’s impeachment inquiry in November 1998. (Luke Frazza/AFP via Getty Images)

That left Trump to be personally defended in the Mueller investigation by a random patchwork of counsel, including Jay Sekulow, a lawyer specializing in religious liberty cases, and John Dowd, a Washington solo practitioner who, according to Bob Woodward, viewed Trump as a “f—ing liar.” (Dowd denies that.) Last but not least, Trump had the assistance of Rudolph W. Giuliani — who has done more than anyone other than Trump himself to get Trump impeached.

Contrast that unimpressive crew with the team assembled by President Bill Clinton, who had not one, but two, top-notch law firms defending him: global powerhouse Skadden Arps, with heavy-hitter Bob Bennett, to handle the Paula Jones case; and the elite Washington defense firm, Williams & Connolly, led by the brilliant David Kendall, to handle the Whitewater investigation, its Monica Lewinsky spinoff and impeachment.

Precisely because he never had a defense team truly suited for the task at hand, Trump found the need now to add to the mix. But the mix still makes no sense. On the team, as of Friday, are the legal odd couple of Harvard Law School professor emeritus Dershowitz and former federal appeals court judge Starr.

It’s hard to see how either could help.

Dershowitz gets specific about his ‘limited role’ in Trump impeachment
Havard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz spoke Jan. 19 about his role on the president’s legal team after Trump picked him, personally. (Video: Meg Kelly/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Dershowitz may be a genius in some ways, but he’s not necessarily the advocate you want on your side. Judges have told me they find him condescending in manner and tone — not the approach you want before a court consisting of 100 U.S. senators. And he’s wont to make off-the-wall arguments. As his former Harvard colleague Professor Laurence Tribe has put it, Dershowitz “revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible.” Dershowitz’s recent assertion that the Supreme Court could order the Senate not to conduct an impeachment trial illustrates the point. Not only is that claim indefensible — it’s also ridiculous.

And then there’s Starr. I know and like Starr, but I can’t comprehend what he’s doing here. He’s best known as the independent counsel whose investigation led to the impeachment of Clinton. That’s hardly helpful for Trump, because Clinton was a piker compared with Trump.

Clinton’s core offense was to obstruct a private civil action about pre-presidential conduct and cover up sexual misconduct — none of which had involved abuse of presidential power. From a constitutional standpoint, that’s a trifle compared with extorting a foreign nation by cutting off federal military funds in an effort to interfere with an upcoming U.S. presidential election.

How one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats approaches impeachment
Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) is facing a tough reelection. He says that has nothing to do with how he is preparing for the Senate’s impeachment trial. (Rhonda Colvin, Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)

As if that were not enough, in the Clinton case, Starr argued that Clinton had committed an impeachable offense by blocking witness testimony and documents. Oops.

Any litigator will tell you that adding to your legal team on the eve of trial most likely will not produce better lawyering but, rather, chaos. In that sense, at least, Trump will be getting the representation he deserves.

Read more:

Trump Lawyer Takes Communications Role Parrying Congressional Oversight

White House is assigning one of its lawyers to a new communications role to handle the stepped-up oversight coming from Democratic-led congressional committees, among other issues, a White House official said Thursday.

Steven Groves, now an assistant special counsel in the White House, will become a deputy press secretary under a broader realignment of duties in President Trump’s press and communications operations, the official said.

.. Mr. Groves had been working under Emmet Flood, the White House special counsel dealing with the Russia investigation.

Before coming to the White House, he worked at the Heritage Foundation and the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

“He speaks law, which will help,” the White House official said.