JUDGE & JURY

Federal District Court Judge Linda V. Parker clearly doesn’t play games in court – or around election laws. In a scathing 110-page decision, she wrote that the Trump lawyers who filed a lawsuit in Michigan to overturn the 2020 presidential election should be sanctioned, pay the city of Detroit and the state for defending the suit, take continuing education courses – and perhaps even be disbarred. “This case was never about fraud,” she wrote. “It was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so…Sanctions are required to deter the filing of future frivolous lawsuits designed primarily to spread the narrative that our election processes are rigged and our democratic institutions cannot be trusted.” In further spanking the attorneys, who included L. Lin Wood and former New York mayor and Trump personal attorney Rudolph Guiliani crony Sidney Powell, she wrote the suit seeking to overturn the election represented “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” the judge wrote, and sought to deceive the federal court and Americans “into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated.”