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Lake’s ‘determined program of misinformation’ won’t end unless she’s forced to pay up, the county said
CAITLIN SIEVERS
Arizona Mirror
Kari Lake and her lawyers repeatedly lied to the court and misrepresented evidence during her election challenge trial last week and should be sanctioned for it, attorneys for Maricopa County wrote in a Tuesday filing.
“The misstatements of fact from Lake and her counsel are not a series of mere accidents or zealous advocacy; they represent a determined program of misinformation,” Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy wrote in the filing.
“Lake and her counsel have absolutely no excuse for offering these falsehoods in Court and should face sanctions from this Court,” he added.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ruled against Lake on May 22, saying she failed to prove during a three-day trial last week that Maricopa County ignored state law and performed no signature verification for early ballots during the 2022 general election.
In his ruling, Thompson affirmed that Democrat Katie Hobbs, who beat Lake by 17,000 votes, is the governor of Arizona.
Liddy pointed out in the county’s request for sanctions that Lake and her lawyers, D.C. employment attorney Kurt Olsen and Scottsdale divorce lawyer Bryan Blehm, were recently sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for making false statements to that court.
“Ethical parties would have been suitably admonished by both the Supreme Court’s statement that they made ‘unequivocally false’ statements to the Court and the monetary sanction that the Supreme Court consequently issued,” Liddy wrote. “But Lake and her counsel were not deterred. Instead, they were inexplicably emboldened.”
Last week’s trial was Lake’s second in Thompson’s courtroom. She lost the first trial in December and appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court, which sent one of her 10 initial claims back to Thompson for further examination and upheld the dismissal of the other nine.
