Kari Lake’s legal team was penalized by the Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday and ordered to pay thousands of dollars in restitution for making “unmistakably false” election-related claims in court. Lake is a Republican candidate for governor in 2022.
Attorneys for Lake were penalized $2,000 by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel for “false factual statements to the Court.”
The sanctions were requested by Democratic candidates Gov. Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes after Lake repeatedly claimed that thousands of “unaccounted for ballots” had been added to Arizona’s vote totals in her defeat to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes.
Even after the Supreme Court “concluded and expressly stated that the assertion was unsupported,” Brutinel wrote, Lake continued to repeat as “undisputed” the claim that 35,563 unaccounted ballots were added to the total count at a third-party processing facility.
“Sometimes campaigns and their attendant hyperbole spill over into legal challenges. But once a contest enters the judicial arena, rules of attorney ethics apply,” Brutinel wrote.
“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.”
Brutinel denied Hobbs and Fontes’ request for attorney’s fees as sanctions.
Kurt Olsen, a lawyer for Lake, said in a statement, “We respectfully disagree with the Court’s holding but look forward to presenting our case at trial on the claim of illegal signatures and any other claim the trial court may consider.”
