Kari Lake ordered to pay $33k in witness fees after failed effort to overturn her election defeat

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Kari Lake’s legal challenge aimed at overturning the results of the Arizona governor’s race is now truly dead, after suffering an initial defeat in which most of the counts she alleged were dismissed.

And now, all the Republican gubernatorial candidate has to show for her effort is a bill from a judge for tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Ms Lake and her supporters are now in the wilderness after her last-ditch bid to block Katie Hobbs from taking office as governor has failed. She has no more lawsuits in the court system, and Ms Hobbs is due to take office in the coming days.

It’s an abrupt change of reality for her far-right fans, who as recently as a few days ago were smugly accusing reporters of spreading fake news for sounding the death knell of her lawsuit when the majority of it was tossed out.

Court documents indicated that the judge declined to go as far as accusing Ms Lake or her attorneys of filing challenges against the election results in bad faith, despite Ms Lake’s own very public refusal to say that she would accept the results of the election before it even occurred as well as her campaign’s total failure to prove that anyone was actually blocked from voting in her race.

Democrats had hoped the judge would impose sanctions against Ms Lake’s attorneys, in a manner similar to the punishment that Rudy Giuliani faced from the New York state bar after spreading Donald Trump’s baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election.

Mr Trump’s (former) legal team remains in jeopardy stemming all the way back to its members’ actions following the conclusion of the 2020 election; prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, in particular are thought to be investigating the efforts of Mr Trump’s ex-attorneys to persuade local officials to overturn or impede the certification of his defeat in the state.

Ms Lake is a longtime supporter of Donald Trump’s baseless election claims and confoundingly blamed long lines for her supporters’ supposed inability to vote this year after contributing to an environment that led to a sharp spike in threats against local election workers for two years through her spread of Mr Trump’s election lies.