Kari Lake's Lawyers Slapped With Six-Figure Fine

Attorneys of Kari Lake, former GOP Arizona governorship candidate, and former Arizona State Representative Mark Finchem were sanctioned by a U.S. district court judge to pay $122,000 for Maricopa County's attorneys' fees in a lawsuit filed before the 2022 midterm elections that alleged that Arizona doesn't use paper ballots.

In their lawsuit, Lake and Finchem asked the court to ban the use of "electronic voting machines" in the 2022 midterms and to require a hand count of all ballots. However, U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi, who found their case to be without merit, rejected their request and sanctioned them in a Friday court order for falsely claiming that Arizona doesn't use paper ballots.

The court order requires attorney Alan Dershowitz, who tried to avoid the sanctions, to pay part of the fine, totaling $12,220, stating that he is "held jointly and severally liable" with the other attorneys mentioned in the case, including Kurt Olsen and Andrew Parker. The attorneys are expected to pay the money to Maricopa County within 30 days starting Friday.

Tuchi dismissed the case in August and said that it was filled with "conjectural allegations of potential injuries" and issued sanctions against the same representing Lake and Finchem—a Trump-endorsed Republican candidate who unsuccessfully ran for secretary of state in the midterms.

Lake's lawyers were also sanctioned in May by the Arizona Supreme Court and were ordered to a $2000 fine for repeating "unequivocally false" claims to the court about the 2022 election, NBC News reported at the time.

Chief Justice Robert Brutinel wrote in the court ruling at the time: "Sometimes campaigns and their attendant hyperbole spill over into legal challenges. But once a contest enters the judicial arena, rules of attorney ethics apply."

"Although we must ensure that legal sanctions are never wielded against candidates or their attorneys for asserting their legal rights in good faith, we also must diligently enforce the rules of ethics on which public confidence in our judicial system depends and where the truth-seeking function of our adjudicative process is unjustifiably hindered," added Brutinel.

Lake has come under a national spotlight for touting Donald Trump's baseless claims of 2020 election fraud and for legally challenging the results of the Arizona gubernatorial race in November in which she narrowly lost to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, by more than 17,000 votes. Since then, she has refused to concede to her opponent and continued to push forward her case in court, arguing that she should be the winner.

The Republican claims that there were problems with printers and tabulation machines in Maricopa County on Election Day that prevented voters from casting their ballots. Lake faced a series of court losses as her lawsuit was dismissed by both Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson and the Arizona Court of Appeals for lacking evidence that the problems were intentionally caused by election officials to disenfranchise GOP voters.

Newsweek reached out by email to Kari Lake's press team for comment.