Sidney Powell stuck with most sanctions for frivolous claims in Michigan election fraud case

Donald Trump's ally and attorney Sidney Powell is among those who Friday largely lost their bid to overturn sanctions related to frivolous claims made in election fraud lawsuits challenging the 2020 results in Michigan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that a lower court mostly got it right when it sanctioned Powell and other attorneys in connection with false claims made in an attempt to reverse the election in favor of Trump. The news comes a month after Powell and other attorneys were hit with a lawsuit by a Michigan attorney regulations agency alleging they committed professional misconduct.

The Sixth Circuit ruling explained how the attorneys refuted their own made-up positions:

"Three voters and three Republican nominees to the electoral college in Michigan brought this suit in a bid to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. The complaint plausibly alleged that Republican election challengers had been harassed and mistreated during vote counting at the TCF Center in Detroit, in violation of Michigan law. But the complaint also alleged that an international 'collaboration'—with origins in Venezuela, extending to China and Iran, and including state actors in Michigan itself—had succeeded in generating hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes in Michigan, thereby swinging the state’s electoral votes to Joseph Biden. Many of those allegations—particularly the ones concerning Dominion voting machines—were refuted by the plaintiffs’ own exhibits to their complaint."

The news was also picked up by Libertarian magazine Reason.com, which explained that the "court concluded that a few of the allegations were not sanctionable, and that two attorneys were sanctioned who should not have been, but otherwise affirmed the district court's conclusions, and reduced the financial award by a modest amount."

"I expect Powell, et al., will file further appeals, but I doubt additional filings will produce different results," the magazine wrote on Friday.

You can read the full opinion by clicking this link.