Still on the hook for more than $1 billion dollars in a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Machines and fighting for her law license, conspiracy theorist lawyer Sidney Powell is now fighting off Wisconsin’s sanctions motion by asking for the evidentiary hearing on a lawsuit that was too defective to survive a motion to dismiss.
The conceit of Powell’s latest salvo in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, one of four states where she unsuccessfully tried to topple President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, is that her failed complaint against the state’s Gov. Tony Evers (D) cannot be found frivolous because it was rejected on procedural grounds such as standing and timeliness.
“In the event the court does not strike defendant’s motion, plaintiff requests a plenary adversarial process and scheduling order, including an evidentiary hearing on the sanctions motion by defendant, requiring defendant Evers to present actual evidence supporting his motion and permitting plaintiff to examine and rebut any evidence he may be able to marshal,” Powell’s attorney Howard Kleinhendler wrote in a 25-page motion on Wednesday night.
U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper, who presided over Powell’s case, poked quite a few more holes in the lawsuit than that last December. She noted that Powell’s team of attorneys managed to misspell the name of their lead plaintiff, would-be Trump elector William Sheehan, as “Meehan.”
Pepper also characterized the suit as a thinly veiled attempt to achieve through the judiciary what Donald Trump’s supporters could not through the ballot.
“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country,” the judge found in 45-page ruling late last year. “One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so. After a week of sometimes odd and often harried litigation, the court is no closer to answering the ‘why.’ But this federal court has no authority or jurisdiction to grant the relief the remaining plaintiff seeks.”
Styling her lawsuits as the “Kraken” — named after the mythical creature given the Hollywood treatment as the octopus-like monster slain in “Clash of the Titans” — Powell and her co-counsel Lin Wood filed three others like it in Arizona, Michigan and Georgia. All failed in turn, with a spate of embarrassing headlines about typo-strewn filings and sworn witnesses found by the Washington Post to have inflated their supposed military credentials in affidavits, and in one instance, had a record of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Diane Joyce Humetewa found little substance to Powell’s claims of international anti-Trump intrigue, a yarn pulling together deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Dominion voting machines, and other members of a cabal of local to international figures pushing for the Biden presidency.
“Not only have Plaintiffs failed to provide the Court with factual support for their extraordinary claims, but they have wholly failed to establish that they have standing for the Court to consider them,” Humetewa said in December. “Allegations that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court. They most certainly cannot be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.”
The “Kraken” cases also floundered in the appellate courts and were not taken up by the Supreme Court of the United States.
One of the targets of Powell’s wild allegations, Dominion employee Eric Coomer, sued Powell along with Rudy Giuliani, One America News Network and its correspondent Chanel Rion, Newsmax, right-wing blogger Jim Hoft and The Gateway Pundit, and others for theories that he claims sparked death threats against him.
Powell and her lawyers did not pass up an opportunity to take an additional swipe at Coomer on Wednesday.
“An examination of his previous public statements has revealed that Dr. Coomer is highly partisan and even more anti-Trump, precisely the opposite of what one would expect from the management of a company charged with fairly and impartially counting votes (which is presumably why he tried to scrub his social media history,” their latest brief states.
For his part, Coomer has claimed that his vilification by Powell and her allies stems from a conspiracy “fabricated” by a Colorado businessman he described as a “political activist and supporter of President Trump with ambitions of creating a political movement.”
Coomer’s attorney Steve Skarnulis did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment. Neither did the representatives for the state of Wisconsin.
Powell ended her latest motion by claiming that the fact that dozens of other litigants tried and failed to change the outcome of the election in the swing states meant her views were widely shared—and not vexatious.
“Indeed, the State of Texas (which was joined by 18 other state Attorney Generals) asked the United States Supreme Court to set aside Wisconsin’s 2020 election results,” the motion states. “Section 1927 sanctions are for multiplied proceedings and vexatious litigation. This case lasted nine days. Defendant’s motion for sanctions is out of time and frivolous. It should be denied.”
Read the filing below:
[image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images]