Judge rules lawyers who challenged Trump's 2020 election loss in Colorado must pay large fines
Lawyers Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker filed suits demanding the 2020 election results be challenged, and now they're being slapped with a hefty fine for it.
The Washington Post reported that Colorado Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter issued a nearly $187,000 fine that the judge hopes will deter others from filing such lawsuits. They must also pay $11,000 in legal fees to the states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, who were both named as defendants in the lawsuit.
"As officers of the Court, these attorneys have a higher duty and calling that requires meaningful investigation before prematurely repeating in court pleadings unverified and uninvestigated defamatory rumors that strike at the heart of our democratic system and were used by others to foment a violent insurrection that threatened our system of government," wrote the judge.
"They are experienced lawyers who should have known better. They need to take responsibility for their misconduct," he also said.
The lawyers filed the case in Dec. 2020 as part of what they said was a class action suit from 160 million American voters. They claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.
The lawyers also falsely claimed that Dominion Voting Systems was part of the scheme and that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg helped. They were demanding $160 billion in damages. It was dismissed in April, but the judge took it a step further by saying that they violated their ethical obligations filing the suit to begin with. He explained that it clogged the courts with frivolous motions using facts that aren't true.
He went on to call the suit "the stuff of which violent insurrections are made." He explained that the lawyers made little effort to determine the truth of their allegations. It's a similar situation to what occurred in Rudy Giuliani's deposition where he confessed that he doesn't have time to confirm his allegations before making them.
The judge explained that the high fees reinforced "the severity of the violation." The lawyers also solicited donations for their lawsuits from the "arguably innocent and gullible public," which the judge also said was improper. He hopes that the penalty will stop future lawsuits that aren't legitimate.
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