A handful of Republican lawyers involved with litigation around the 2020 election have claimed that Trump diehard Sidney Powell added their names to her clownish election lawsuits without their permission, or inflated their involvement in the Big Lie cause.
A lawyer for enthusiastic conspiracy theorist Lin Wood, who was named in Powell’s infamous Michigan lawsuit, insisted in an interview with the Guardian this week that his client didn’t draft the complaint and didn’t sign it. He “did not authorize anyone to put his name on it,” Wood’s lawyer, Paul Stablein, told the Guardian. Wood also recently accused Powell of using her lawsuits as a grift.
As the Guardian notes, Wood is one of several lawyers who have distanced themselves from Powell’s sideshows, saying they were not involved.
Derrick Van Orden, a failed GOP congressional candidate who was named in Powell’s election suit in Wisconsin, claimed via Twitter on Dec. 1 last year that he didn’t know his name was on the suit and only found out through social media.
On top of that, some of the lawyers who had given Powell permission to name them in her suits are now claiming that she overinflated the extent of their involvement.
Emily Newman and Gregory Rohl, two attorneys who are now facing sanctions over the dead-end Michigan lawsuit, insisted to the judge that they barely had a role in the litigation. Rohl claimed he read Powell’s entire 830-page initial complaint in just “well over an hour” and didn’t make any changes to it.
Powell did not respond to TPM’s inquiry about the claims.
Powell had used the other lawyers’ names to hype her lawsuits and boost fundraising efforts for her “Defending the Republic” nonprofit, which she claimed had a team of top-notch attorneys who would “protect the integrity of elections in the United States.”
That nonprofit and Powell’s political action committee with the same name are under federal investigation, according to the Guardian and the Washington Post, which was the first outlet to report the probe on Wednesday. The U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia slapped the groups with a grand jury subpoena in September, the Post reported.
