The US Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear an appeal from a group of attorneys associated with former president Donald Trump, led by Sidney Powell, against sanctions placed upon them for allegedly abusing the Michigan state legal system in their 2020 election fraud lawsuit.
The case, Powell v. Whitmer, began in 2020 when Michigan saw a record-high voter turnout for then-candidate, now President Joe Biden. Powell and the rest of Trump’s legal team challenged these results, particularly the record number of mail-in ballots submitted due to COVID-19, requesting the certification of the Michigan election results to be delayed.
After multiple filings and an extended July hearing, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and several other defendants requested the court assess sanctions against Powell and the rest of the Trump legal team. Whitmer and the defendants claimed that Powell and the Trump team “unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings” despite Michigan’s electoral college vote in December 2020 making the suit moot and “knew or should have known that their legal claims were frivolous” while continuing with the lawsuit. The defendants also alleged that the Trump legal team lied during the legal proceedings when they claimed that “the absentee voting counts in some counties in Michigan have likely been manipulated by a computer algorithm,” “Smartmatic and Dominion were founded by foreign oligarchs and dictators” and “[t]he several spikes cast solely for Biden could easily be produced in the Dominion system by preloading batches of blank ballots.”
The US District Court Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division largely sided with Whitmer and the defendants, writing, “[Powell’s election fraud suit] should never have been filed. The State Defendants and the Intervenor-Defendants should never have had to defend it.” The court assessed both monetary and disciplinary sanctions against Powell and several other members of the Trump legal team. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals largely affirmed the district court’s sanction. However, the appeals court did remove the sanctions and fees against some members of Trump’s legal team and reduced the overall monetary sanctions owed to around $150,000. Powell and several of the attorneys whose sanctions were not reversed filed a petition for certiorari to the US Supreme Court.
The sanctions case is only one of many lawsuits dogging former Trump attorney Powell. In January 2021, Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit against Powell, claiming she defamed the company with her statements alleging that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, that the company was created in Venezuela to rig their elections in favor of Hugo Chavez and that Dominion bribed Georgia election officials so that they were the only company whose machines were used in Georgia. In March 2022, the Texas State Bar Association filed a complaint against Powell claiming that she engaged in misconduct by pursuing baseless lawsuits alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential election. In December 2022, Wisconsin’s governor also filed sanctions against Powell for similar allegations to those of the Michigan sanctions suit. And in 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to six criminal charges in a Georgia case involving former president Donald Trump and his allies’ alleged attempts to interfere in the 2020 US presidential election.
