Sidney Powell and Other Trump-Aligned Lawyers Will Face Legal Penalties

Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood and several other lawyers who advanced former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election will face legal penalties after the Supreme Court declined to take up their appeal.

The penalties — upwards of $130,000 in legal fees incurred by the election officials they sued, plus referrals to their state bar associations for potential discipline — stem from a lawsuit the lawyers filed in Michigan in November 2020. That suit, one of dozens in the sweeping effort by Mr. Trump’s campaign and allies to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, alleged that state officials had schemed to “fraudulently and illegally manipulate the vote count.”

A district court in Michigan in December 2020 rejected the lawsuit’s call for officials to decertify the state’s true election results and falsely certify Mr. Trump as having won Michigan. And in 2021, the same court imposed the penalties on nine lawyers behind the lawsuit, saying those lawyers had “abused” the judicial process by making claims not backed by law or evidence, by not investigating those claims before leveling them in legal filings and by “dragging out” the proceedings.

“Despite the haze of confusion, commotion and chaos counsel intentionally attempted to create by filing this lawsuit, one thing is perfectly clear: Plaintiffs’ attorneys have scorned their oath, flouted the rules, and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary along the way,” the court wrote, chastising Ms. Powell, Mr. Wood and the other lawyers: Scott Hagerstrom, Julia Haller, Brandon Johnson, Stefanie Lynn Junttila, Howard Kleinhendler, Emily Newman and Gregory J. Rohl.

The lawyers have been appealing ever since. Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for