Trump-aligned lawyers ordered to pay $175,000 in sanctions fees for bogus election fraud lawsuit

By Tierney Sneed

A group of lawyers aligned with former President Donald Trump — including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood — were ordered Thursday by a federal judge to collectively pay more than $175,000 in sanctions-related fees stemming from a bogus election fraud lawsuit they filed last year.

US District Judge Linda Parker ordered that the lawyers pay the $21,964.75 in attorneys’ fees for the Michigan state officials they sued in the lawsuit. She also ordered that the lawyers pay $153,285.62 in attorneys’ fees for the city of Detroit, which was also a defendant in the election reversal lawsuit filed last year.

“Plaintiffs’ attorneys, many of whom seek donations from the public to fund lawsuits like this one, see https://defendingtherepublic.org/, have the ability to pay this sanction,” Parker wrote in an opinion Thursday.

Parker is giving the Trump-aligned attorneys 30 days to pay the fees. The order will be put on hold, however, if the attorneys appeal her underlying decision from August ordering the sanctions, the judge said Thursday.

In the opinion in August announcing that she’d be ordering sanctions, Parker said the lawyers had “engaged in litigation practices” that were “abusive and, in turn, sanctionable.”

“Sanctions are required to deter the filing of future frivolous lawsuits designed primarily to spread the narrative that our election processes are rigged and our democratic institutions cannot be trusted,” the judge wrote in the August opinion.

Wood said he would appeal the order in a statement to CNN Thursday evening. “I undertook no act in Michigan and I had no involvement in the Michigan lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell,” he said.

Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This story has been updated with a comment from Lin Wood.

The-CNN-Wire
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