Wisconsin wants $106k from lawyer Sidney Powell over ‘bad faith’ lawsuit backing Trump’s election lies

Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell was blasted in a court filing by the state of Wisconsin as it attempts to make her pay $106,000 in legal fees for her flunked lawsuit to reverse the results of the 2020 election based on conspiracy theories lacking any foundation in fact.

Democratic governor Tony Evers pushed a Milwaukee federal judge to repudiate Ms Powell’s defence of her “bad faith” lawsuit, which claimed that some competitive states worked with Dominion Voting Systems and foreign hackers to steal the election.

Dominion filed a $1.3bn lawsuit against Ms Powell in January because of her false claims about the company.

Ms Powell is the lawyer who pushed her fraudulent claims about the 2020 election so far that Mr Trump once asked his staff “She really is crazy, huh?” according to Axios.

Ms Powell argued earlier that she shouldn’t be liable for any legal fees because she filed a genuine complaint against the state of Wisconsin. But Mr Evers said the original lawsuit was littered with factual errors, “expert reports” by people who were not experts and inadmissible anonymous declarations, some of which were inaccurate, Bloomberg reported.

The state said in its filing that the motion for legal fees is not “a request for a guided tour through the scattershot of supposed evidence that they flung at the wall here, in the vain hope that something would stick, or even leave a mark”.

Mr Evers is also looking to get $145,000 from Mr Trump because of another failed lawsuit attempting to reverse the results of the election.

President Joe Biden won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 election by more than 20,000 votes.

Ms Powell led Mr Trump’s quest to overturn the election after Mr Biden had been declared the winner.

The Trump campaign ended their relationship with Ms Powell after she had made numerous baseless claims about the election.

She falsely claimed, among other things, that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines in favour of Mr Biden, prompting the company’s $1.3bn lawsuit against her.

She filed a motion in March to have the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process,” according to the motion filed by one of her lawyers.

The attorney added: “All the allegedly defamatory statements attributed to Defendants were made as part of the normal process of litigating issues of momentous significance and immense public interest.”

The Independent has reached out to Ms Powell for comment.

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