Woes mount for legal loyalists who pushed Trump’s election conspiracies

Crew of lawyers including L Lin Wood and Sidney Powell battling investigations and lawsuits that threaten their careers

A crew of conservative lawyers still pushing disinformation that echoes Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged are now battling federal inquiries, defamation lawsuits and bar association scrutiny that threaten to cripple their legal careers.

Former justice department officials say Trump’s legal loyalists are weakening trust in the American electoral system via persistent repetition of his baseless claims. They note that some are actively backing Republican drives in key states to change election laws seen as undermining voting rights for communities of color.

Take Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump conspiracy promoter and ex-federal prosecutor.

After a short stint on Trump’s legal team last December, where she made wild claims about election fraud due to a voting machine company’s alleged ties to Venezuela, which sparked a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against her, Powell in late May drew ridicule for telling a Dallas QAnon meeting that Trump could be “reinstated” this summer.

There is also election law veteran Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s infamous January call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where Trump urged him to “find” 11,000-plus votes to block Joe Biden’s win. Mitchell is now leading a $10m FreedomWorks drive in seven states to tighten election laws in ways that are seen as crimping voting rights.

Trump’s high-pressure call led the Fulton county district attorney to open a criminal inquiry.

Meanwhile, Atlanta lawyer L Lin Wood, who worked with Powell in Georgia in a failed drive to reverse Biden’s win by filing baseless lawsuits alleging fraud, told Talking Points Memo he donated $50,000 to help fund a bizarre vote “audit” in Arizona’s largest county – even though Biden’s victory there has been certified.

Known for his frenzied pro-Trump advocacy, including charging that Vice-President Mike Pence ought to be executed by a firing squad, Lin has other legal headaches in Georgia, where he is battling a state bar request for him to take a confidential mental competency exam after it conducted an extensive review into his alleged legal misconduct.

Further, Georgia election officials in February launched an investigation into allegations that Wood may have voted illegally in the state last year after he had bought a home in nearby South Carolina. Wood has denied voting illegally.

But among Trump’s fervent legal allies Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer during the campaign, faces the gravest threats in a widening federal investigation into whether he broke lobbying disclosure laws by representing foreign officials in Ukraine, while working to gather dirt there on Biden to boost Trump’s electoral chances.

The federal inquiry, led by US prosecutors in the same New York office that Giuliani once headed, gained potentially damaging evidence in late April when FBI agents raided Giuliani’s home and office in Manhattan and seized more than 10 cellphones and other electronic equipment.

Other pro-Trump lawyers are also feeling legal heat.

Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, who shared a $1m contract with a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the US on bribery charges and reportedly helped Giuliani’s Ukraine efforts, seem to have been ensnared in part of the Giuliani investigation. Using a search warrant, federal agents took a Toensing cellphone in late April on the same day as the Giuliani raids, but Toensing has said she was told she is not a “target”.

Former senior justice department officials voice dismay about the conduct of Trump’s legal allies.

Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, said he was astounded by the turn that Giuliani, Powell and diGenova have taken in “becoming cheerleaders for Trump and his assault on democracy”.

“I have known them all at times over the past several decades when they each held positions of respect and some distinction,” Ayer said. “It’s a real head-scratcher for me, given that background, that they have each become so utterly disconnected from reality in pursuit of a totally unworthy cause.”

Other departmental veterans say pro-Trump lawyers probably have mercenary motives.

“Lawyers who make preposterous and counterfactual statements to the public typically only do it when there’s something in it for them – and that usually means money,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of DoJ’s fraud section.

But there’s no doubt that Trump’s legal allies are feeling painful fallout from making suspect charges.

Both Powell and Giuliani have been hit with $1.3bn defamation lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems for conspiratorial statements that tied the Denver-based election equipment firm to nefarious fraud schemes.

Powell and Giuliani have separately argued that the lawsuits ought to be dismissed. Powell has stressed that her dubious allegations were protected by the first amendment free speech rights.

Still, Powell’s defense was damaged in May when her lawyers incongruously claimed she was just being hyperbolic in charging Dominion had ties to left-leaning Venezuela, and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.

However, the legal threats facing Giuliani are notably higher due to the widening two-year-old inquiry by prosecutors into whether he was an unregistered foreign agent for Ukrainian officials who were aiding the lawyer in his quest to find damaging information about Biden.

The criminal inquiry is reportedly focused on Giuliani’s part in Trump’s firing of the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, in May 2019, a move that Giuliani and two close associates – indicted separately on charges of campaign finance violations – promoted, and a key issue in Trump’s first impeachment.

After the recent FBI raid that obtained his legal devices, Giuliani denounced the federal inquiry: he said he had not lobbied anyone in the US government on behalf of any foreign officials, and told Fox News the inquiry was “trying to frame him”.

But more damaging details of Giuliani’s pro-Trump Ukraine blitz were released this past week by CNN, after it obtained a secret recording from 2019 where Giuliani aggressively cajoled a high-level Ukraine official to help Trump by investigating baseless conspiracies involving Biden whose son was on a Ukrainian gas company’s board.

Further, after Giuliani’s lawyers cited attorney-client privilege to limit the use of potentially damaging materials from the raid, a New York judge acting on a request from federal prosecutors tapped a retired judge as a “special master” to review the materials seized, and decide what investigators can use as they pursue possible criminal charges.