The federal appeals court based in Denver upheld a sanction of nearly $187,000 against two attorneys who pursued unproven claims that Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook and multiple officials in swing states violated the rights of all American voters during the 2020 presidential election.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit previously agreed the underlying lawsuit was a nonstarter because the plaintiffs lacked standing – meaning they failed to show a specific injury they suffered from the purported vote-altering scheme.

Now, a three-judge panel of the appellate court also affirmed the trial judge’s award of $186,922 to the defendants, agreeing that attorneys Gary D. Fielder and Ernest J. Walker tried to litigate a clearly meritless lawsuit without doing their homework.

“In short, plaintiffs’ arguments regarding standing were so inadequate that it was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to conclude that the claims were made in bad faith, vexatiously, wantonly, or for oppressive reasons,” the panel wrote in a Dec. 13 order.

The decision, which was unsigned, came from Chief Judge Jerome A. Holmes and Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich, both appointees of George W. Bush, and Judge Veronica S. Rossman, a Joe Biden appointee.

Fielder issued a statement saying he and Walker spent “thousands” of hours researching and preparing the case, which they brought on behalf of eight named voters and the remaining 160 million registered voters in the country. He vowed to appeal the sanctions decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which already declined to hear his appeal of the lawsuit’s dismissal.

“Never did we think that our actions were unethical or frivolous,” Fielder wrote. “We were representing voters from across the country and, now, fear that the affirmation of the sanctions imposed against us will have a chilling effect on other lawyers.”

The 2020 presidential election spawned a raft of litigation alleging voter fraud and violations of election law, concentrated among swing states. Fielder and Walker filed their own lawsuit in December 2020 in Colorado’s federal trial court. Intended as a class action, it asked for $160 billion in damages – $1,000 for each registered voter – and for a legal declaration that the actions of the defendants, including state elections officials, were null.

The lawyers named as defendants the voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems, Inc.; social media platform Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg; the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life; the governors of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; and 10,000 unidentified “co-conspirators.” 

The lawsuit alleged the defendants engaged in a “coordinated effort” to change voting laws, alter votes, provide illegal methods of voting, count illegal votes and “suppress the speech of opposing voices.”

The parties agreed to have a federal magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, handle the case. Neureiter granted the defendants’ request to dismiss for lack of standing, and then determined Fielder and Walker were liable for monetary sanctions because their claims were serious, but also clearly meritless.

Given the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 by supporters of then-President Donald Trump seeking to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes, “circumstances mandated that plaintiffs’ counsel perform heightened due diligence, research, and investigation before repeating in publicly filed documents the inflammatory, indisputably damaging, and potentially violence-provoking assertions about the election having been rigged or stolen,” Neureiter wrote on Aug. 3, 2021.

Fielder responded by complaining in a video to supporters that he only consented to the magistrate judge handling the case because “we don’t need the judge. … We just need the magistrate to sit quietly off to the side and sign orders that we present after argument.”

He then filed an appeal to the 10th Circuit, insisting he could prove to a jury his claims about a “cabal of progressives” illegally influencing the election outcome. Fielder also argued Neureiter’s monetary sanctions were designed to prevent him from speaking about the 2020 election.

The 10th Circuit disagreed on all counts. Neureiter’s conclusion that no reasonable attorney would have believed the plaintiffs had standing to bring the lawsuit was “amply supported in the record.” Specifically, the panel pointed to Fielder’s inability to show how his lawsuit was viable compared to all of the other election challenges that had failed to gain traction.

“At the hearing on the motions to dismiss and the motions to amend, the district court explicitly gave Mr. Fielder the opportunity to distinguish the many adverse cases cited by the defendants, but he was not able to meaningfully do so,” the panel wrote.

As for the decision to name various state officials outside of Colorado as defendants, Fielder and Walker “could not identify a single case supporting the proposition that a federal court sitting in State A has personal jurisdiction over an official of State B regarding actions taken by that official with regard to elections within State B.”

The panel added that Neureiter’s order did not violate the lawyers’ First Amendment rights because frivolous litigation is not immune from sanctions.

An Associated Press review of potentially illegal votes in competitive states found an absence of widespread fraud that would have affected the outcome of the election.

The case is O’Rourke et al. v. Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. et al.