Colorado lawyers who filed election lawsuit must pay rivals’ fees

DENVER — A national magistrate connected Wednesday levied penalties against 2 Colorado attorneys for filing a class-action suit that alleged the 2020 statesmanlike predetermination was stolen from Donald Trump.

The now-dismissed suit relied connected baseless conspiracy theories dispersed by the erstwhile president and his supporters. It named elected officials successful 4 plaything states, Facebook, the company’s laminitis Mark Zuckerberg and Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, whose predetermination machines were astatine the halfway of immoderate of the astir fevered speculation.

Magistrate Judge N. Reid Nureiter ruled that the 2 attorneys who filed the suit indispensable wage the ineligible fees of the defendants.

“The suit enactment into oregon repeated into the nationalist grounds highly inflammatory and damaging allegations that could person enactment individuals’ information successful danger,” Nureiter wrote, noting the Jan. 6 insurrection was spurred by the lies it repeated, arsenic were threats against predetermination and Dominion officials. “Doing truthful without a valid ineligible ground oregon superior autarkic idiosyncratic probe into the facts was the tallness of recklessness.”

There are fewer recourses against mendacious lawsuits different than penalizing lawyers for filing them. Repeated audits and recounts recovered nary important fraud successful the statesmanlike election. Even Trump’s own administration said the predetermination was clean.

That did not halt Trump and his allies from filing dozens of suits and continuing to importune the contention was stolen from him, a prevarication that inspired the crowds that stormed the U.S. Capitol connected Jan. 6. In the end, Trump and his allies mislaid much than 50 of the predetermination lawsuits.

The lawyers successful the Colorado case, Gary D. Fielder and Ernest J. Walker, were not connected with different Trump lawyers — including Sidney Powell, who is 1 of aggregate Trump-backing attorneys who look imaginable sanctions for an unsuccessful suit challenging the predetermination results successful Michigan.

Fielder and Walker said during a tribunal proceeding past period that they were trying to support democracy.