Now, those same words used to prop up her side of the story could come back to haunt her.
On the heels of her court loss challenging the election result Monday, Lake posted an opinion column from conservative news site TownHall.com on her Twitter account decrying her loss, claiming Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson’s ruling against her was potentially ghostwritten by attorneys aligned with Democrats and her opponent, Governor-elect Katie Hobbs.
“The trial court judge in Kari Lake’s election lawsuit predictably threw out her case on Saturday, putting on a sham trial that on the surface looked fair to the general public that doesn’t know any better, but to legal minds was a travesty of justice,” Rachel Alexander, a conservative blogger and a onetime assistant attorney general for Arizona, wrote for the site on Monday.
“Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson only gave her two days for a trial and issued his ruling immediately afterwards, even though he could have taken several days, and it was one of the biggest, most important cases in the country,” Alexander added.
Alexander then cited unnamed “legal experts” who believed Thompson’s decision was ghostwritten by top left-wing attorneys like Marc Elias, who “emailed him what to say”—a claim Lake echoed, and then deleted, in a post on Twitter later that day.
Elias—whose firm represented Hobbs in the case—quickly denied the allegation in a tweet of his own, calling her rationale for her loss in court “more insane than even I predicted.”
And now Lake’s tweet could come back to hurt her as she faces nearly $700,000 in sanctions for a lawsuit she and her attorneys maintain was filed in good faith.
In its own court filing this week, Maricopa County cited Lake’s tweet in its motion seeking for Lake to reimburse legal expenses in the case, describing the allegations as nothing more than baseless cover intended to sow doubt on a legal outcome that was decided against a dearth of evidence from Team Lake, whose case relied on a bevy of unreliable experts in a trial marred by numerous mishaps.
The lack of evidence ultimately led Thompson to dismiss eight out of ten claims in the suit before ruling against the merits of her case entirely in a Christmas Eve ruling.
“Indeed, the entire purpose of this litigation was to plant baseless seeds of doubt in the electorate’s mind about the integrity and security of the 2022 General Election in Maricopa County,” Maricopa County Attorney Thomas Liddy wrote on behalf of the defendants in a motion seeking sanctions against Lake earlier this week.
“And while it is one thing to do so on TV or social media sites, it is another thing entirely to attempt to use the imprimatur of the courts to try to achieve that goal,” Liddy added.
Newsweek has contacted Lake for comment, including about the now-deleted tweet promoting the article.
