A federal judge’s Monday order could lead to significant fines for those who have tried to overturn the 2020 election using the legal system.
Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter ordered Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker, two Colorado attorneys, to pay nearly $187,000 for the legal fees of groups they sued in a Dec. 2020 complaint claiming election fraud, according to The Washington Post. Included in this figure is over $11,000 to cover the legal fees of the states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, both defendants in the suit.
This order is one of the first efforts to put a dollar figure on penalties for those who filed lawsuits attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, said The Post. In the election, current Democrat President Joe Biden won against then incumbent Republican President Donald Trump.
Even though there has been no evidence of voter fraud in the election, Trump continues to claim that the election was stolen from him.
In their class action suit filed on behalf of 160 million U.S. voters, Fielder and Walker named Dominion Voting Systems; Facebook; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Pricilla Chan; the Center for Tech and Civic Life; elected officials and more as defendants. Neureiter’s 21-page order also includes a $50,000 payment to Facebook and $62,930 each to Dominion and the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
It alleges that the defendants “engaged in concerted action to interfere with the 2020 presidential election,” by means that included: changing voting laws without legislative approval, use unreliable voting machines, altering votes through an illegitimate adjudication process, providing illegal methods of voting, counting illegal votes, suppressing the speech of opposing voices and more.
“As officers of the Court, these attorneys have a higher duty and calling that requires meaningful investigation before prematurely repeating in court pleadings unverified and uninvestigated defamatory rumors that strike at the heart of our democratic system and were used by others to foment a violent insurrection that threatened our system of government,” wrote Neureiter.
According to a website for Fielder and Walker’s class action suit, Fielder has practiced as an attorney for 25 years and has conducted more than 400 jury trials in federal and state courts all across Colorado. Walker, who served in the U.S. Navy, practiced in business/employment litigation with Giarmarco Mullins & Horton PC and was Special Assistant to the General Council of the US Army at the Pentagon immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Before the judge’s order for Fielder and Walker to pay defendants named in the suit, the case was dismissed this spring. By August, Neureiter ruled that the attorneys had violated their ethical obligations by filing it at all.
“They are experienced lawyers who should have known better.
They need to take responsibility for their misconduct,” Neureiter wrote.
He decided that Fielder and Walker had disregarded “legal rules that prohibit clogging the courts with frivolous motions and lodging information in court that is not true,” and linked their suit to violent insurrections such as the Capitol riots in January, according to The Washington Post.
Fielder and Walker have appealed Neureiter’s order, said the outlet. While they did not respond to the paper’s request for comment Monday, the lawyers have previously argued that their suit was not filed in bad faith.
Neureiter wrote that the hefty fees included in the order are appropriate given “the severity of the violation” and because the lawyers had solicited donations from the “arguably innocent and gullible public” to fund their suit. He agreed to stay his order pending the result of the lawyers’ appeal.
A spokeswoman for Dominion said the company was “grateful for the court’s findings.”
Another group of lawyers who challenged the election in Michigan have also been penalized by a federal judge. This group includes Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, who are at risk of losing their law licenses.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has also made public claims of election fraud, had his license suspended by a panel of judges in New York this summer for “false and misleading statements.”
Dominion has sued Powell, Giuliani and a number of other individuals and media organizations for defamation.
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