Attorneys sue Alan Dershowitz in Kari Lake lawsuit

Kari Lake appears in a November 2020 YouTube screengrab. Alan Dershowitz was photographed on January 29, 2020 in Washington, DC near the Capitol.

A legal group filed a lawsuit against the Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz on Friday, he claimed he broke the rules of legal ethics while serving as lead attorney for Arizona’s former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) in a failed voting machine lawsuit against Arizona’s governor-elect Katie Hobbs (D).

this lawsuit, Lake vs. Hobbs, a multi-pronged attack on the integrity of Grand Canyon State’s electoral process — particularly with regard to the use of electronic ballot-tallying machines. Originally filed in April this year, the lawsuit was dismissed in August. Earlier this month, Dershowitz and other attorneys who worked on the lawsuit were sanctioned in federal court.

That cash complaint focuses primarily on a number of allegations attributed to Dershowitz that were contained in this failed lawsuit and found to be without merit. The filing describes them as “baseless conspiracy theories – easily debunked – with no legal or factual basis”.

The 65 Project, which describes itself as a non-partisan group of “legal and political figures,” filed the complaint with the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers Office of Bar Counsel, an administrative agency that investigates allegations of unethical behavior against barristers. The group that filed the complaint is named after 65 separate lawsuits filed by donald trumpAllies and fellow travelers following his 2020 election defeat for President Joe Biden.

One example cited by the attorneys’ lawsuit is the lawsuit’s allegation that the infamous cyber ninja audit of Maricopa County’s voting machines found a “significant” number of “inconsistencies” between the vote counts reported in the software and the officially reported results pointed out.

“However, that is not true,” says the attorney’s complaint. “In fact, there was no significant difference between the official results and the exam results.”

That’s basically what the county officials said, Tweeting after the audit concluded that Cyber ​​Ninjas’ “draft report confirms that the county’s campaign advertising for the 2020 general election was accurate and that the candidates confirmed as winners did indeed win”.

The lawsuit cites the August order dismissing Lake’s lawsuit Barack Obama– Appointed US District Judge John J. Tuchi:

There were no significant differences between the hand count of the provided ballots and the official Maricopa County campaign results. This is an important finding because paper ballots are the best evidence of voter intent and there is no reliable evidence that paper ballots have been altered to any significant extent.

In his December 1, 2022, sanctioning order, the judge said that Lake and her co-plaintiffs made “false, misleading, and unsubstantiated statements of fact” in the case and further admonished the attorneys involved, writing that they “at the very least acted recklessly in the proceeding.” unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied by seeking an injunction [their clients’] careless claims.”

The attorneys’ suit also sues Dershowitz over an allegation in the Lake lawsuit that various election files and ballot images were deleted from vote counting machines. This time, citing the granted application for sanctions in the case, it said these cited files and images “were either not subpoenaed and therefore not provided or not found due to the incompetence of the cyber ninjas.”

The attorney’s lawsuit extensively documents another discredited allegation from the lawsuit — again citing both Tuchi and the sanctions request:

In order to argue that there was a tremendous risk of voter fraud and rigging in Arizona, Mr. Dershowitz argued that “[a]All electronic voting machines can be connected to the internet or cellular networks, directly or indirectly, at various steps of the voting, counting, tabulation and/or reporting process.” This is incorrect. As the defendants stated, “Maricopa County’s voting system is not, has never been, and cannot be connected to the Internet. The Arizona Senate Special Master confirmed that Maricopa County uses an air-gap system that “provides the necessary isolation from the public internet and is actually in a self-contained environment” with no wired or wireless connections in or out of the Ballot Tabulation Center ‘ so that ‘the voting network and voting machines cannot connect to the public internet.'”

On three separate occasions, the attorneys’ lawsuit alleges Dershowitz of promoting “lying.”

“As with so many of these lies, the veracity of these claims could have been easily debunked with publicly available information and with a reasonable inquiry from Mr. Dershowitz,” the complaint reads. “Instead, he chose to encourage these untruths and filed his complaint anyway.”

Specifically, the attorneys’ lawsuit alleges that Dershowitz violated three codes of ethics that prohibit: (1) attorneys from making and defending legal claims that they know are unfounded; (2) that attorneys must respect the rights of others; and that (3) they shall not knowingly engage in “conduct that involves dishonesty, fraud, deception or misrepresentation.”

Law&Crime reached out to Dershowitz for comment on this story, but no response had been received at the time of publication.

In response to the sanctions order, Dershowitz said, “I have not contested the results of any Arizona election. I have given legal advice on the future use of machine counting by companies that refuse to disclose the inner workings of their machines. I support transparency in elections.”

Lake, a former news anchor, lost the 2022 midterm election by around 17,000 votes to Hobbs, the current secretary of state.

“Mr. Dershowitz has been involved in numerous scandals, but now he’s helping lead the assault on democracy.” David Brock, co-founder of The 65 Project, in a press release. “Mr. Dershowitz had previously sought to disfellowship two esteemed attorneys for speaking out about his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein Matter. If Mr. Dershowitz thought that was a reasonable basis for disqualification, then surely his conduct in violating court rules for fraudulent election conspiracy claims warrants discipline. Mr. Dershowitz should respect American democracy as much as himself.”

Lake filed late Friday a new lawsuit.

The latest lawsuit alleges that “hundreds of thousands” of “illegal votes” crossed the line between her and Hobbs and “infected the Maricopa County election.” The filing, which also alleges “willful misconduct,” aims to overturn the 2022 election results and is asking a court to overturn the Democratic victory and install the Republican nominee, or alternatively rerun the election.

Dershowitz is not a named attorney in Lake’s counter-choice lawsuit.

[images: Lake via screengrab/YouTube; Dershowitz via Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images]

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