The Texas agency responsible for regulating the legal profession has asked a judge to impose disciplinary measures against attorney Sidney Powell, the Republican litigator and conspiracy theorist who pushed to overturn former president Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
According to court documents released on Tuesday, the Texas state bar Commission for Lawyer Discipline accused Ms Powell of “professional misconduct” in violation of five separate violations of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct.
Specifically, the commission said the “multiple federal lawsuits” Ms Powell filed in different federal courts in late 2020 — each containing outlandish claims of fraud that were rejected out of hand by judges — “were brought with “no reasonable basis” for her to “believe the lawsuits …were not frivolous”.
Ms Powell, a former federal prosecutor who was once best known for authoring a 2014 book, Licensed to Lie, which denounced her former colleagues prosecutions of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, the late Alaska senator Ted Stevens, and other high-profile defendants, gained attention in pro-Trump circles through her representation of disgraced Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
But in the wake of Mr Trump’s loss, Ms Powell gained yet more attention in right-wing media through a string of incendiary television appearances in which she alleged the election had been tainted by foreign interference and fraud.
She also appeared at a now-infamous press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters alongside Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, during which she claimed equipment made by two major voting machine manufacturers — Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — “were created in Venezuela” at the behest of the late dictator Hugo Chavez “to make sure he never lost an election”.
At the same press conference — and in court documents — Ms Powell also claimed Dominion Voting Systems software had been used to rig the 2020 election under the control of George Soros through Lord Malloch-Brown, who was then the chairman of Smartmatic’s board even though the two companies are competitors and have nothing to do with each other.
She made similar claims in her so-called “Kraken” lawsuits filed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which were dismissed by the courts. Last year, the federal district judge who heard her lawsuit in Michigan granted a motion for sanctions against her and eight-other pro-Trump lawyers, order them to pay legal fees incurred by Michigan government officials and referring them to their respective state bars for discipline.
At the time, the judge, Linda Parker, called Ms Powell’s lawsuit “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” and specifically singled out her failure to ask for the suit to be dismissed after the state’s certification of its election results made the case moot.
The Texas commission noted Judge Parker’s ruling in their complaint and said Ms Powell “took positions that unreasonably increased the costs or other burdens of the cases and unreasonably delayed the resolution of the matters”.
They also accused her of making a patently false statement in her Georgia “Kraken” lawsuit by altering a document to make it appear as if it was undated, in violation of Texas rules barring lawyers from “knowingly” offering or using evidence known “to be false,” as well as rules prohibiting lawyers from making a “false statement of material fact” to a tribunal or engaging in “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation”.
The committee has asked for the Dallas County, Texas district court to enter “a judgment of professional misconduct” against her and “determine and impose an appropriate sanction”.
If the court grants the motion, Ms Powell could be forced to pay fines, repay the Texas commission’s legal fees, and could even lose her license to practice law.
