Judge orders far-right Republican to pay legal costs in Arizona election lawsuit

Mark Finchem, the extremist Republican and longtime member of the Oath Keepers anti-government militia group, has been slapped with penalties for his “groundless” lawsuit seeking to overturn his loss in the election to become Arizona’s secretary of state.

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Judge Melissa Iyer Julian of Maricopa county superior court had already thrown out a lawsuit brought by Finchem in which the rightwinger claimed that electoral fraud had cost him victory when he was defeated in November’s midterm elections by Democrat Adrian Fontes.

After Julian tossed that suit, Fontes and Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate who had beaten fellow far-right fringe candidate Kari Lake to become the new governor of Arizona, asked the court to issue sanctions against Finchem and also Lake after she sued over her defeat.

Fontes’s legal team cited Finchem’s lawsuit as a “politically motivated weaponization of the legal process meant to perpetuate the dangerous narrative that our elections are unreliable, our elected leaders are corrupt, and our democracy is broken – all because Mr Finchem lost the election”, the Arizona Republic reported last December.

Finchem and Lake have also consistently claimed that Joe Biden’s pivotal victory in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election was tainted by voter fraud and should be overturned in favor of Donald Trump.

Now Julian has ordered Finchem and his legal team to cover the legal fees of Fontes and Hobbs and some other related costs, a number of outlets reported on Monday.

Julian wrote in the case documents: “None of contestant Finchem’s allegations, even if true, would have changed the vote count enough to overcome the 120,000 votes he needed to affect the result of this election. The court finds that this lawsuit was groundless and not brought in good faith.”

The judge added that Finchem and his team had not only made no effort to establish if their claims of electoral unreliability were true but had continued to make false claims of fraud despite contradictory evidence.

She noted that imposing financial sanctions in such a case was rare, but justified in this case.