Trump cronies who filed lawsuits falsely claiming election fraud must pay their targets' legal fees

The Associated Press reports that a federal magistrate has ordered lawyers who posed "baseless conspiracy theories" about the 2020 election to pay their targets' legal fees.

"The lawsuit put into or repeated into the public record highly inflammatory and damaging allegations that could have put individuals' safety in danger," Nureiter wrote, noting the Jan. 6 insurrection was spurred by the lies it repeated, as were threats against election and Dominion officials. "Doing so without a valid legal basis or serious independent personal investigation into the facts was the height of recklessness."

There are few recourses against false lawsuits other than penalizing lawyers for filing them. Repeated audits and recounts found no significant fraud in the presidential election. Even Trump's own administration said the election was clean.

This was the (or one of the) lawsuits against state election officials, Mark Zuckerberg and voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Key in this classic Angry Judge ruling appears to be the lack of claims beyond generalizations, evidence that it was "cut-and-pasted" from other lawsuits, and the blatant political marketing of the lawsuit by those now penalized.