After a testy Zoom hearing on Friday afternoon, March 26, a Minnesota district court judge fined a right-wing attorney ten thousand dollars for perpetrating what he called a fraud on the court and on the attorney’s supposed clients in a contest lawsuit that she filed in early December 2020 challenging the re-election of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Among the blizzard of litigation that followed the November 2020 general election were a flurry of election contest lawsuits challenging the (re-)election of a number of Minnesota Democrats—including all five of the Dems in the state’s congressional delegation who were re-elected in 2020.
All of the contest lawsuits were dismissed for severe legal-foundational flaws in December. In February, however, one of the three individuals who had been listed as a contestant (which is effectively the same thing as a plaintiff) in the lawsuit contesting Rep. Omar’s re-election contacted the district court to ask that her name be removed from the legal record. She explained that she had no idea until late February that the lawsuit even existed; while she had signed an “affidavit” (which she thought was a garden-variety internet petition) circulated by grass-roots right-wing groups shortly after November 3 asserting that she disputed the outcome of the election, she had never consented to be a party to a lawsuit, nor had anyone told her that she was named as such.
This led to Friday afternoon’s Zoom hearing, at which all three of the Minnesotans who had been named as contestants in the Omar contest testified that they had no idea they were parties to any such lawsuit, nor had they ever consented to participate. The increasingly irate district court judge then grilled Susan Shogren Smith, the right-wing attorney who filed the Omar contest (as well as four other contests challenging the re-election of Minnesota Dems in Congress) about her conduct in filing a lawsuit without once speaking to her putative clients.
St. Paul’s Pioneer Press takes up the story:
As Shogren Smith explained in court, what [named contestant Corinne] Braun had signed was an affidavit that agreed she “will be joining with other voters across Minnesota to contest Minnesota election results.”
Braun, though, said she didn’t understand the implications.
“To me, that meant the same as going online and signing a petition,” Braun said. “As a lay person, an affidavit doesn’t mean anything.”
Through her questioning, Shogren Smith explained to Braun that contesting an election in Minnesota means filing a lawsuit. At that point, Judge Castro interrupted to suggest the explanation was long overdue.
“You should have had this conversation with your client back in November and not now,” he said.
Shogren Smith acknowledged she never spoke with the plaintiffs or informed them of the outcome of the case, even when Braun and two other unwitting plaintiffs were ordered to pay $3,873 to the defendants at the conclusion of the case.
At the end of the hearing, the court ordered the three contestants’ names removed from the lawsuit and fined Smith ten thousand dollars. (Prior to the hearing, Smith and other unnamed parties had already paid the ~$4,000 judgment that Braun and the other contestants had been hit with at the end of the lawsuit.)
From one perspective, all this is shocking: bizarre behavior by a licensed attorney leading to a stunning fine from a Minnesota district court. From another, though, it’s heartening to see the court system taking serious offense to the conduct of the people who wasted huge quantities of court resources on totally frivolous attacks on the elections (indeed usually landslide elections) of Democratic officials. I won’t weep for Susan Shogren Smith.
Edited to add: For whatever it’s worth, Raw Story has picked up the Pioneer Press report.