PHOENIX, AZ — Kari Lake says the lawsuit she and Mark Finchem filed before the Arizona Primary was not in bad faith.
Lake says her lawyers should not be sanctioned.
On Thursday, Federal District Court Judge John Tuchi disagreed saying Lake's and Finchem's legal team filed false, misleading, and unsupported claims in their lawsuit against Maricopa County.
Lake and Finchem tried to block Maricopa and Pima counties from using any electronic device to cast or count votes.
Their case was thrown out in August. Judge Tuchi called it frivolous and baseless.
"When a judge issues a 30-page ruling with specific detailed factual findings that is a judge who is irate over the misconduct of attorneys who have engaged in basically a fraudulent case," said Attorney Tom Ryan, an election law expert.
Lake and Finchem wanted only paper ballots which are already used and they wanted the ballots to be counted by hand.
In his 30-page ruling ordering sanctions, Judge Tuchi wrote the plaintiffs sought "massive, perhaps unprecedented federal judicial intervention."
Tuchi went on the say, "They never had a factual basis or legal theory that came anywhere to meeting the burden."
Ryan said, "the court ruled maybe Finchem and Lake should have known better, but the lawyers must have known better and should have known better."
The legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Andrew Parker, Jesse Kibort and Joseph Pull from Parker Daniels Kibort LLC in Minnesota and Kurt Olsen, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney.
In a statement through her spokesman Ross Trumble, Lake said, "Sanctions like this are rare. In every lawsuit, there will be a winner and a loser. Sanctioning the loser is rare and has to rise to the level of subjective bad faith or frivolity. This case is not about money or gain. It was essentially a public interest lawsuit seeking electoral integrity. It is very rare to sanction a party in public interest suits. There were 5 experts called by the plaintiff. One cannot be in "bad faith" with that many experts supporting your theory. They could be wrong. But not bad faith."
"Punishing counsel," the statement read, "is a serious effort to impugn the professional reputation of counsel. This could lead to a bar complaint. Doing this deters other lawyers from ever agreeing to help conservatives. We saw this in real-time in 2020 with numerous Trump lawyers."
Tom Ryan said that is exactly the point, "As judges realize that this election denial industry is not going away and that sanctions that they have imposed haven't stopped, I believe they're going to start to turn to additional penalties and sanctions to bring this to a grinding halt."
