This afternoon the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit largely upheld a district court order imposing significant sanctions on Sidney Powell and other "Kraken" lawyers who had filed various unsubstantiated and frivolous claims challenging the results of the 2020 Presidential election in Michigan. While trimming the total penalties awarded, and lifting the sanctions imposed on two named attorneys, the court's decision affirmed that the attorneys engaged in sanctionable conduct through a combination of filing frivolous claims and failing to exercise proper diligence as to the veracity of claims made in their filings.
Judge Kethledge wrote for the unanimous panel in King v. Whitmer, joined by Judge Boggs and Judge White. His opinion begins:
Three voters and three Republican nominees to the electoral college in Michigan brought this suit in a bid to overturn the results of the state's 2020 presidential election. The complaint plausibly alleged that Republican election challengers had been harassed and mistreated during vote counting at the TCF Center in Detroit, in violation of Michigan law. But the complaint also alleged that an international "collaboration"—with origins in Venezuela, extending to China and Iran, and including state actors in Michigan itself—had succeeded in generating hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes in Michigan, thereby swinging the state's electoral votes to Joseph Biden. Many of those allegations—particularly the ones concerning Dominion voting machines—were refuted by the plaintiffs' own exhibits to their complaint. Other allegations arose from facially unreliable expert reports; still others were simply baseless. The district court found the entirety of the plaintiffs' complaint sanctionable, and ordered all of plaintiffs' attorneys, jointly and severally, to pay the defendants' and the City of Detroit's reasonable attorney's fees. We find only part of the complaint sanctionable, and thus reverse in part and affirm in part.
