DALLAS (CN) — The State Bar of Texas has filed a disciplinary action against attorney Sidney Powell, accusing her of professional misconduct for filing several federal lawsuits contesting the election of President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump in 2020.
The bar association’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline filed the lawsuit in Dallas County District Court on March 1, and the case was first made public seven days later. The commission says it sued Powell, of Dallas, after receiving 10 separate complaints against her since December 2020.
“Beginning in or about November of 2020[,] respondent filed multiple federal lawsuits in different jurisdictions (including the District Court of Arizona, the Northern District of Georgia, the Eastern District of Michigan, and the Eastern District of Wisconsin) alleging, inter alia, election fraud has occurred in the national presidential election in 2020,” the six-page complaint states. “Respondent had no reasonable basis to believe the lawsuits she filed were not frivolous.” (Parentheses in original.)
The lawsuit claims Powell violated Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 and five subsections of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct.
The commission alleges Powell took positions in the litigation that “unreasonably increased the costs” of the cases and “unreasonably delayed” their resolution, including an alleged failure to drop a lawsuit in the Eastern District of Michigan when “requested relief was moot.”
It further claims Powell submitted a certificate in the case before the Northern District of Georgia that she purported was undated.
“The certificate was altered to remove the date, and respondent’s statement that the certificate was undated was false,” the complaint states.
Telephone calls to Powell’s office requesting comment were not answered Tuesday afternoon.
The lawsuit comes two weeks after the Sixth Circuit Circuit blocked Powell and other attorneys from avoiding sanctions imposed in the Eastern District of Michigan lawsuit. The trial judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker, ordered the attorneys in August to pay the legal fees for the city of Detroit and other defendants in the case. In a blistering opinion, the Barack Obama-appointed judge also ordered them to take 12 hours of training – including six hours focusing on election law.
“This case was never about fraud – it was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so,” Parker wrote at the time.
Powell was fired from the Trump campaign’s legal team in November 2020 after publicly discussing unsupported conspiracy theories about the election. She had been criticized for incorrectly suggesting a computer server containing proof of voting irregularities was located in Germany and that voting software used in several states was created under the direction of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Those claims resulted in Dominion Voting Systems filing a defamation suit against Powell in January 2021 for $1.3 billion.
The State Bar’s lawsuit comes one month after Powell sued Verizon to block the release of her cellphone and subscriber information to the House January 6 Select Committee.
Follow @davejourno
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