State Bar of Texas not backing down in fight against former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell
The Dallas attorney at the center of the Fox News-Dominion case should still face a sanctions suit.
It’s good to see the State Bar of Texas isn’t giving up its fight to win sanctions against former Donald Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.
Citing mostly procedural errors by the bar, a judge in February tossed out its suit against Powell for allegedly filing “frivolous” lawsuits in four states alleging voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
How disappointing it was to read in Collin County state District Judge Andrea Bouressa’s order dismissing the case. It noted that she was doing so in part because the bar had improperly labeled a handful of exhibits attached to one of its filings. Such an important case should never have been thrown out on such flimsy grounds.
The bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline had been silent on what it would do next — whether accept Bouressa’s ruling or fight it. That mystery was solved when the bar recently filed a 1,300-page request urging the judge to reconsider her decision.
The bar’s motion includes both an acknowledgment of its misnumbered exhibits and regret “for any confusion this mistake may have created for the Court.” It notes, however, that the correctly numbered exhibits were already contained elsewhere in the court file, of which the judge obviously had access and easily could have considered.
As if not to take any chances, the bar attached to its motion more than 1,200 pages of documents that included much of the court’s public file.
This case was supposed to go to trial April 24. We advocated repeatedly for this full public airing of Powell’s specific actions in the baseless election fraud suits against the states of Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Such an airing — under oath — is even more important now in light of this week’s $787.5 million settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems, which had sued the network for defamation.
In her failed suits against the four states, Powell alleged a vast conspiracy among Dominion, foreign actors and other political operatives who fraudulently inflated votes in favor of Joe Biden.
Powell appeared often on Fox News in the days after the election pushing her fraud allegations without evidence, despite Dominion’s insistence they were false. Evidence in the suit showed that Fox hosts continued to invite Powell onto their shows even after they began having concerns about her claims.
Back in Texas, in her response last week to the bar’s request for its sanctions case to be reopened, Powell insists she “did not knowingly file any false or material documents to support the claims in the election fraud suits.” The state bar says there is “ample evidence” that Powell “may have engaged in conduct that, at minimum, involved dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”