Lawyers for failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem are stuck with the tab for lawsuits they filed seeking to discredit the 2022 midterm election before it happened without any hard evidence, according to a ruling by Federal District Judge John Tuchi.
“Failing to impose meaningful sanctions here might very well encourage others to follow suit by lending their credibility to documents filed in court without facing any real consequence if their certifications prove hollow or incomplete,” Tuchi said in his most recent ruling. “The need for general deterrence is therefore significant.”
Tuchi called the suit a “frivolous complaint.”
The lawyers covered under the ruling include retired Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and Andrew D. Parker and his law firm, Parker Daniels Kibort LLC, and Kurt B. Olsen and his law firm, Olsen Law PC. They must pay a total of $122,000 in fines. Much of Tuchi’s ruling was aimed at Dershowitz, who dismissed the claim.
“I have never challenged the results of any Arizona elections,” Dershowitz wrote. “I have provided legal advice about the future use of vote-counting machines by companies that refuse to disclose the inner workings of their machines. I support complete transparency in all vote counting on a non-partisan basis, as I did in Bush v Gore in 2000.”
Judge Imposed Sanctions In December But Did Set Amount
In December, Tuchi ordered the sanctions against the attorney but did not put a dollar figure on the penalties. Lake and Finchem filed lawsuits in April 2022 against Maricopa and Pima counties. They called on the court to block the counties from using electronic voting machines and to use paper ballots that would be counted by hand instead. Finchem’s lawsuit was thrown off quickly; however, Lake went through two trials before the court ruled that Maricopa County’s voting machines were rigged by county workers.
Tuchi dismissed Lake’s suit last August saying it was based on “conjectural allegations of potential injuries.”
Maricopa County Pleased With Ruling
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the defendants in the case, demanded the sanctions in response to the “numerous false allegations about Arizona elections.” The county’s lawyer expressed relief with the ruling.
“These guys run a lawsuit with no evidence at all and waste $122,000 of taxpayer money — but now we got it back,” Maricopa Deputy County Attorney Mark Liddy told The Arizona Republic following Tuchi’s latest ruling.
Tuchi recounted his December ruling in his latest ruling last Friday in which he called their suit “reckless.”
His ruling stated that he did “not condone litigants … furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process.”
Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, told The Arizona Republic that “too many examples in recent years of attorneys trying to weaponize the court for political purposes … It is wrong, it is unethical, and these attorneys must be held accountable if we are to protect our democratic republic.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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