MI: A federal judge presses Trump-allied lawyers on 2020 election fraud claims in sanctions hearing
The latest effort to hold former president Donald Trump and his allies accountable for months of baseless claims about the 2020 election played out Monday in a Michigan courtroom, where a federal judge asked detailed and sceptical questions of several lawyers she is considering imposing sanctions against for filing a suit seeking to overturn the results.
U.S. District Court Judge Linda V. Parker said she would rule on a request to discipline the lawyers in the coming weeks. But over and over again during the more than five-hour hearing, she pointedly pressed the lawyers involved, including Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, to explain what steps they had taken to ensure their court filings in the case filed last year had been accurate. She appeared astonished by many of their answers.
While their suit aimed to create a broad impression that the vote in Michigan — and specifically Detroit’s Wayne County had been troubled, the affidavits filed to support those claims included obvious errors, speculation and basic misunderstandings of how elections are generally conducted in the state, Parker said.
The Michigan hearing is part of a broad move underway nationally to hold responsible Trump and his backers who spread falsehoods about the election, the so-called “big lie” that led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers (D) has asked a federal judge to order Trump and three of his attorneys to pay the state’s attorneys’ fees in a case the former president filed in December unsuccessfully challenging President Biden’s win there.
Trump and his lawyers told a judge in a court filing Monday that the request for attorney’s fees was “untimely and unwarranted Nessel’s announcement came after a state Senate committee led by Republican Sen. Ed McBroom concluded last month that had been “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in Michigan and recommended Nessel “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.
” Another message showed that Ward texted the board’s chairman four days after the election — a time when ballots were still being tallied that ultimately confirmed Biden’s narrow in the county. “We need you to stop the counting,” she wrote. A spokeswoman for Brnovich said he had received the letter and would review it, declining to comment further.
Meanwhile, a series of $1.3 billion defamation suits filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Giuliani, Powell and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell are moving through the civil courts. The company argues that the three Trump allies repeatedly lied about the company, creating a “viral disinformation campaign” that convinced the public that Dominion’s voting machines were used to flip Trump votes to Biden and swing the election.
In court Monday, Kleinhendler told Parker that Merritt had done training with the intelligence unit and was prepared to testify about his qualifications but only in a sealed hearing because of the confidentiality of his work.
In another instance, a cybersecurity analyst based in Texas stated in a sworn declaration that more than 139 per cent of registered voters in the city of Detroit had cast ballots — a dramatic irregularity that, if true, would have signalled obvious problems or fraud in the predominantly Democratic city.
However, city records showed that just under 51 percent of registered voters cast ballots. While that error was corrected in later filings in the case, Fink noted to the judge that among those who would go on to echo the claim was Trump, who mentioned the false statistic in a Jan. 2 phone call to the secretary of state of Georgia as he sought to overturn Biden’s win in that state.
“The suggestion that this is some harmless error because it was ultimately corrected flies in the face of the reality of what actually happened,” Fink said. “These lies were put out into the world. When they were put out into the world, they were believed.”
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