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In the wake of the 2020 election cycle, plenty of Republican conspiracy theorists lost plenty of lawsuits that never should’ve been filed. But for some, the defeats in the courtroom weren’t the end of their troubles.
For example, Arizona’s Mark Finchem, a failed right-wing secretary of state candidate, has been sanctioned twice for filing frivolous election-related cases. As it turns out, one of his high-profile allies has run into similar trouble. NBC News reported:
The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday sanctioned attorneys for Kari Lake, the 2022 Republican candidate for governor, ordering them to pay thousands of dollars for repeating “unequivocally false” election claims in court. Chief Justice Robert Brutinel fined Lake’s attorneys $2,000 for making “false factual statements to the Court.”
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. Months before Election Day 2020, Lake, Finchem, and their lawyers filed a federal lawsuit, hoping to prevent Maricopa and Pima counties from using electronic election equipment. The case was so absurd that it led to court sanctions from a federal judge who marveled at the Republicans’ “frivolous complaint.”
But after Election Day 2020, Lake and her legal team continued with their efforts, leading to more defeats, and as of yesterday, more sanctions. From the NBC News report:
Gov. Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, both Democrats, had sought the sanctions after Lake repeatedly claimed that thousands of “unaccounted for ballots” had been added to Arizona’s ballot count in her loss to Hobbs by roughly 17,000 votes. Even after the Supreme Court “concluded and expressly stated that the assertion was unsupported,” Brutinel wrote, Lake continued to repeat as “undisputed” the claim that 35,563 unaccounted ballots were added to the total count at a third-party processing facility.
The state Supreme Court’s chief justice went on to write, “Sometimes campaigns and their attendant hyperbole spill over into legal challenges. But once a contest enters the judicial arena, rules of attorney ethics apply.”
Or put another way, judges don’t much care when politicians and their lawyers lie during media appearances or on Twitter, but deceptions in court are something else entirely.
To be sure, the $2,000 financial penalty is hardly overwhelming — the figure is vastly smaller, for example, than the court sanctions Donald Trump’s team faced for filing a ridiculous anti-Clinton case last year — though it nevertheless reinforces the important fact that Lake and her attorneys took their anti-election case to court, only to be penalized for making “unequivocally false” claims.
As the Republican conspiracy theorists eyes another statewide campaign next year, Arizonans probably haven’t heard the last of this.