Supreme Court won’t hear bid to overturn sanctions against Kari Lake’s lawyers

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear an appeal from lawyers who represented Kari Lake and Mark Finchem in a 2022 lawsuit seeking to block Arizona counties from using electronic vote tabulators. The high court gave no explanation, leaving intact $122,000 in sanctions against attorney Andrew Parker, originally imposed by Judge John Tuchi, who called the suit's claims conjectural and frivolous.

The lawsuit, which also involved celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz and D.C. attorney Kurt Olsen, argued Arizona's tabulators were vulnerable to hacking and sought to force manual counting despite state law requiring the machines' use. The 9th Circuit upheld the sanctions against Parker a year later, though it dropped Dershowitz given his limited role; Olsen did not join the final appeal.

Tuchi had written that the sanctions were meant not to let Lake and Finchem off the hook but to deter similarly baseless filings generally. Parker's attorney warned the Supreme Court that such sanctions would chill creative legal theories, while Maricopa County's lawyers countered that the sanctions reflected filings built on speculation rather than evidence.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.