Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D) has requested court-imposed sanctions against ex-President Donald Trump, his lawyers, and disgraced attorney Sidney Powell that would force the group to cover over $200,000 in state legal fees overall. Evers is challenging Trump and his allies over their slew of post-election lawsuits that alleged, in short, that fraud was responsible for Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin and elsewhere. These lawsuits were “built on inscrutable conspiracy theories,” Evers’s team noted in new court filings.
Evers wants over $106,000 in sanctions against Powell and some $144,000 in sanctions against Trump and his legal team (which included Powell for a short while). If granted, Powell, Trump, and the ex-president’s attorneys would have to somehow come up with these amounts in order to compensate for the state of Wisconsin’s legal fees. No court anywhere in the country ever even partially accepted the rigged election lies that drove Trump and Powell’s litigation.
As Evers’s team put it in their new filings:
‘This litigation imposed significant costs on the taxpayers of Wisconsin. Those costs were needless, because Trump’s suit never had any merit, this litigation was precluded by exclusive state-court proceedings, and the costs were exacerbated by strategic choices made by Trump and his lawyers.’
Trump has continued to push the lie that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, although at this point, believing this conspiracy theory would no doubt require also believing that essentially every significant level of government in just about every electorally significant state and in Washington, D.C., has been secretly infiltrated by covert election fraudsters. This idea isn’t reflective of reality — it’s delusional fantasyland nonsense. Nevertheless, Trump reiterated his rigged election claims at, among other venues, this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and Republican attendees ate it up.
While in office, Biden has proven significantly more popular than Trump. As of this Friday, Biden has the approval of roughly 54 percent of the overall population, according to a weighted polling average from FiveThirtyEight. Trump left office with the approval of less than 40 percent of Americans, according to the same source.
