Alex Constantine - October 4, 2021
Judge slams a pair of pro-Trump lawyers for 'just repeating stuff' the former president 'is lying about' after dismissing election fraud case
By Mia Jankowicz
Insider, July `7, 2021
A Colorado judge gave a scathing rebuke to a pair of lawyers after he dismissed their case challenging the results of the 2020 election, suggesting they were just parroting former President Donald Trump's talking points.
Lawyers Gary Fielder and Ernest John Walker filed a class-action suit in December last year, claiming to represent the voting rights of 160 million Americans. They accuse a slew of high-profile politicians and tech CEOs of thwarting a Trump election victory with China and Iran's help, according to court documents seen by Insider.
The pair have bankrolled their case via a crowdfunding page calling it "the largest civil rights class-action lawsuit in history."
The case was dismissed in April, one of the numerous failed attempts to implicate voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems in an alleged plot to steal the election for Joe Biden.
But Federal Judge N. Reid Neureiter found the case so frivolous that he called Fielder and Walker in for a hearing Friday to ask them if they had been used "as a propaganda tool" for Trump, The Washington Post reported.
"Did that ever occur to you? That, possibly, [you're] just repeating stuff the president is lying about?" Neureiter said, referring to Trump, the Post reported.
Fielder and Walker argued that they filed the case in good faith, and plan to re-file the case despite the threat of sanction from Neureiter, the Post reported.
Theirs is one of several cases that appears to be heavily influenced by evidence-free claims by the former president, despite none of them having succeeded in court.
It also named Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as defendants in a loosely-woven series of allegations of Democratic bias and unconstitutional modifications of electoral law.
It asks damages of $1,000 for every registered voter in the US.
Neureiter asked the lawyers if they had thoroughly investigated the case's claims, such as that Dominion Voting Systems' machines had allowed Chinese and Iranian tampering, NBC's 9 News reported.
Two days before Walker and Fielder filed their case, then-Attorney General Bill Barr announced that the FBI had seen no evidence of widespread voter fraud. In November, Chris Krebs, then-director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, publicly stated that the election was the "most secure in American history."
Neureiter compiled a list of factors that a "non-frivolous" lawsuit should be ready to consider, including Barr and Krebs' statements. He told the lawyers that they should have been a "red light for you, at least a flashing yellow light," the Post reported.
Fielder and Walker did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.