Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is considering whether she should seek sanctions in court against attorneys involved in challenging the results of the 2020 election.
The Democratic official announced on Tuesday during an end-of-year phone briefing that penalties may be warranted against members of the Trump legal team and their allies who have made “what we believe to be an intentional misrepresentation” of facts in election-related lawsuits.
“I think we need to go back to a time where you can trust an attorney is making an accurate and truthful representation to the court, because if they don’t, then they won’t be able to practice law anymore,” she added.
Michigan has been one of a handful of battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden in which Trump and his supporters are trying to overturn the election results.
Nessel isn’t quite ready to leap into action yet, however.
“No final decisions have been made, but the attorney general’s office will consider seeking sanctions when appropriate, including in cases where arguments made by plaintiffs’ attorneys were clearly unsupported by facts,” Ryan Jarvi, a spokesperson for the attorney’s general office, told the Washington Examiner. “Professional litigators should know better than to waste the court’s time with baseless arguments designed to mislead the public, and we will consider filing grievances against those who violated the rules of professional conduct all attorneys swear to abide by.”
Although litigation challenging the results of the election across multiple battleground states have been largely unsuccessful, a lawsuit focused on Antrim County, Michigan, voting machines has garnered the attention of the Trump legal team because of an audit of voting machines, which resulted in a report warning of the potential for “systematic fraud” that has been disparaged by Michigan state and Dominion Voting Systems officials.
One of the attorneys Nessel could go after is Sidney Powell, whose name was mentioned during her call with reporters.
Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuits in states such as Michigan have alleged voting machines are being used in a vote-changing scheme involving foreign powers. Her litigation has not had much success in court, and federal and state officials have said they have not seen evidence of widespread voting fraud. Dominion and one of its competitors, Smartmatic, have threatened litigation, which Powell has shrugged off.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, a Democrat from New Jersey, filed legal complaints with the Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New York, and Pennsylvania bars — where the Trump campaign has brought lawsuits to challenge the election results — against Rudy Giuliani and 22 other lawyers last month, which earned rebukes from some across the political aisle.
