Sidney Powell's claim that 'no reasonable person' would believe her comes back to bite her

Sidney Powell’s defense against a $1.3 billion lawsuit over her lies about voter fraud in the 2020 election could come back to bite her.

Powell, a lawyer who supported Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud and filed multiple failed lawsuits across the country seeking to overturn the 2020 election, is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after she falsely accused the company of conspiring with a dead Venezuelan dictator to rig the election against Trump.

Back in March, Powell argued that Dominion’s lawsuit should be dismissed because “no reasonable person” would believe her lies about voting machine rigging.

Now, however, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is using Powell’s defense in the Dominion lawsuit to support filings on Feb. 1 made by Nessel, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson with the Attorney Grievance Commission in Michigan and the State Bar of Texas calling for Powell’s disbarment.

Nessel is seeking sanctions against Powell and three other attorneys for filing frivolous lawsuits to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the Wolverine State, asking that they be stripped of their licenses to practice law and forced to repay legal fees incurred as a result of their suits.

“Faced with the specter of more than $1.3 billion in damages in the Dominion Action, Ms. Powell has adopted a new litigation strategy to evade Dominion’s defamation claim: the truth. Whether that strategy will be advantageous in the Dominion Action remains to be seen, but it strongly underscores why sanctions and attorneys’ fees are appropriate here,” reads the brief Nessel filed in the sanctions cases, according to the website Law & Crime.

The brief continues, “If there were any doubts about counsel’s mindset when filing this action, Ms. Powell has put them to rest. She and her co-counsel knew there was no reasonable basis for the statements they made in this litigation, but they made them anyway.”

In seeking to defend herself against the sanctions Michigan is seeking, Powell had said in February that she shouldn’t be disbarred because her allegations of fraud could be proved, the Detroit Free Press reported.

But that doesn’t jibe with Powell’s defense in the Dominion lawsuit, which claimed that “reasonable” people would not have believed her claims.

Nessel tweeted on Wednesday, “As lawyers, fidelity to the law is paramount and these attorneys seemingly made statements they knew were misleading in an effort to further conspiracy theories in an effort to erode public trust in government and dismantle our systems of democracy. Their actions are inexcusable.”

Powell is one of a number of people Dominion has sued for the lie that the voting machine company rigged the election against Trump — a lie that was officially debunked in a joint Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security report in March. Dominion has also sued Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Fox News, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.