Insider
Sidney Powell asks for sanctions order to be reversed, saying the judge unfairly portrayed her team as ‘dangerous lunatics’
Mia Jankowicz – February 8, 2022
- In August, a judge criticized Powell over abuses of the legal system in failed election-fraud cases.
- Powell asked a court to reverse the punishment against her in a Monday filing.
- She said the judge portrayed her team as “overwrought, dangerous lunatics.”
Sidney Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who was sanctioned over lawsuits that said the 2020 election was rigged, has asked for her punishments to be reversed, saying the federal judge unfairly painted her team as “overwrought, dangerous lunatics.”
Powell and eight of her cocounsels were sanctioned last August over joint election-rigging claims that the judge called a “historic and profound abuse” of the legal system. The move came with a referral to disciplinary boards, with the potential for disbarment.
Powell, who promised to “release the Kraken” through lawsuits that alleged election fraud, had her claims dismissed in court multiple times.
One central claim — which mobilized an unfounded conspiracy theory about the voting-technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion — landed Powell with a $1.3 billion defamation suit. Powell countersued in September.
In her order, Linda V. Parker, a federal judge in Michigan, said Powell failed in her due diligence, used “speculation, conjecture, and unwarranted suspicion” in place of evidence-backed claims, and continued pursuing the cases long after they failed.
Parker said the case wasn’t about election integrity — it was “about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”
Powell was initially part of former President Donald Trump’s election-litigation team, but he later distanced himself from Powell.
But Powell continues to pursue her allegations. In a 97-page appeal brief filed on Monday, which Insider viewed, she called the punishment “intemperate” and requested the case be reassigned to a different judge.
Parker did “everything possible to make Appellants seem overwrought, dangerous lunatics,” Powell said.
In sanctioning Powell and her cocounsels, the order had “the clear purpose of depriving them of their livelihoods,” Powell said.
In response to Parker’s comment that she had relied on hearsay in her lawsuits, Powell said that cases were routinely processed “all on nothing more than a single person’s sworn say-so.”
The Monday filing also drew on some literary references, quoting Shakespeare and Voltaire.
“The District Court has improved upon Voltaire’s observation that ‘[t]yrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them,'” it said. “It managed to shred the Constitution at the very same time it wrapped itself in the flag.”
Referring to a plot to kill Henry VI, Powell also quoted: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
“Shakespeare knew that lawyers were the primary guardians of individual liberty in democratic England,” she said.