Former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the will of the state’s 3.3 million voters was so weak and time-consuming that he and his lawyers should be punished for wasting taxpayer resources, said the Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers in a federal court case.
Donald Trump should be ordered to pay Wisconsin $ 145,000 to cover legal fees the state has racked up to defend against former president’s ‘random’ election fraud trial, state told judge .
Trump’s attempt to overthrow the will of the state’s 3.3 million voters was so weak and time-consuming that both he and his lawyers should be punished for squandering taxpayer resources, the governor of Wisconsin said , Tony Evers, in a case filed Wednesday in federal court in Milwaukee.
“There is no reason for Wisconsin taxpayers to bear the cost of this attempt to hijack the democratic process,” Evers said on the record.
The lawsuit was one of more than 60 unsuccessful cases brought by Trump and his allies trying to overturn election results in battlefield states like Wisconsin, which was a narrow fit for Joe Biden. A federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of the Trump case in Wisconsin and the United States Supreme Court denied the review.
“We completely disagree with the allegations and will respond to them in due course,” Trump’s lawyer in the case, William Brock, said on a phone call.
Evers, a Democrat, also called on the judge to issue additional punitive sanctions against Trump and his lawyers to deter future litigation aimed at challenging election results without the proper legal pretension to do so.
‘Bad faith’
“From the time they filed this lawsuit until the Supreme Court refused, Trump and his lawyers pleaded in bad faith,” Evers lawyer Jeffrey Mandell said in the file.
Trump’s 70-page lawsuit was condemned early on, state said because it “failed to clearly identify an identifiable cause of action” and “failed to list the essentials of any legal claim let alone attempt to respond to these elements. “
Even after the state pointed out the shortcomings to Trump, the president’s lawyers did not amend the complaint and instead “repeatedly announced different wordings of the relief he sought, all of which suffered from significant constitutional flaws and logical ”, according to the file.
“Trump and his lawyers have been either reckless or extremely negligent at every stage of this litigation,” Evers said.