FILE — Sidney Powell, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, leaves the federal court in Washington, June 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
The so-called “Kraken” of the legal system has won a personal and professional victory in the Lone Star State.
On Thursday, a Dallas-based court of appeals upheld a trial court decision that decided against any form of discipline for attorney Sidney Powell over her November 2020 lawsuits that sought “to prevent the certification of election results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”
In early 2023, the case was tossed on a defense motion to dismiss because of mislabeled evidence and several other deficiencies.
A three-judge panel of Democratic Party judges said the problems with the case against Powell were even worse than that.
“By its own admission, the Bar misidentified or failed to include multiple exhibits it claims to have relied on in its Second Amended Response,” the opinion by the Fifth District Court of Appeals reads. “But the deficiencies go far beyond mislabeling exhibits.”
According to the State Bar of Texas, Powell had no reason to believe the lawsuits she filed were not frivolous and she attached evidence from “wholly unreliable” sources to the complaints she filed. The quasi-governmental attorney ethics group also alleged that Powell relied on or made several false statements during her unsuccessful legal efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election.
As it turned out, however, bar authorities could not prove their case because they relied on a poorly-constructed record. And when they later tried to amend their case, those efforts fell just as flat.
In defending their second effort, the bar argued they “generally referenced” four distinct exhibits that should have allowed them to defeat Powell’s motion for summary judgment and have a trial.
Those exhibits, the appeals court said, were simply nowhere to be found.
“The Second Amended Response has no reference, general or otherwise, to any of these exhibits,” the opinion reads. “As the trial court correctly observed, the Second Amended Response contained ‘only three citations to purported summary judgment evidence,’ specifically, two references to Exhibit F and one reference to Exhibit E (apparently intending to refer to Exhibit G). Indeed, the Bar not only failed to cite to or argue about any additional documents — the documents are not mentioned at all.”
And, even that excuse from the bar misses the point, the appellate court said. Under Texas law, “citing generally to voluminous summary judgment evidence in response to either a no-evidence or traditional motion for summary judgment is not sufficient.”
Powell’s track record as an attorney has been successfully challenged elsewhere — as the appeals court explains in a footnote, she was sanctioned for her election-disputing lawsuit filed in Michigan.
More Law&Crime coverage: Michigan Lawyers Outline Aftershocks of ‘Kraken’ Sanctions Ruling, Ranging from ‘Investigatory Hearing’ on Sidney Powell’s ‘Bar License’ to Unresolved Fight Over Fees
But, the appeals court found, the Texas Bar failed to “evince or raise a fact question about a lack of honesty or integrity” on Powell’s part.
In plain language, authorities filed two sloppy complaints and were then unable to defend their work when the time came to do so.
“The Bar employed a ‘scattershot’ approach to the case, which left this court and the trial court ‘with the task of sorting through the argument to determine what issue ha[d] actually been raised,”” Justice Dennise Garcia wrote for the unanimous panel. “Having done so, the absence of competent summary judgment compels our conclusion that the Bar failed to meet its summary judgment burden.”
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