Attorney L. Lin Wood holds up a Bible while speaking during a press conference on election results in Alpharetta, Georgia, U.S., December 2, 2020.
Elijah Nouvelage | Reuters
Pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood, who had unsuccessfully challenged the results of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win in key states, said Monday that he had virtually nothing to do with one such election lawsuit in Michigan, where he was listed as counsel.
Wood’s effort to distance himself from that case came in a frequently contentious videoconference where a federal judge considered whether to slap sanctions or financial penalties on the plaintiffs and their attorneys, including the pro-Trump “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell, who filed the legal complaint in November.
“I did not review any of the documents with respect to the complaint. My name was placed on there, but I had no involvement,” Wood told U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in the virtual hearing.
“I just had no involvement whatsoever with it,” Wood said, adding that he had not been following the litigation and found out about the motion for sanctions through newspaper articles.
But David Fink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit, shot back that Wood had been notified by email and first-class mail and given an opportunity to withdraw proceedings in mid-December. “Any other representation by him is blatantly false,” Fink said.
Asked about his relationship to the case, Wood told the judge that he did “not specifically recall being asked about the Michigan complaint, but I had generally indicated to Sidney Powell that if she needed a quote-unquote trial lawyer, I would certainly be willing or available help her.”
Powell said she “can’t imagine” she would have added Wood to the lawsuit without his express knowledge.
But she added: “Might there have been a misunderstanding? That’s certainly possible.”
The lawsuit had been dropped voluntarily in January, a month after the judge said there was “nothing but speculation and conjecture” to support the allegation that votes for then-President Donald Trump had been switched to Biden in the Great Lakes State.
The defendants in the case, including Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, are now pushing the judge to issue punishments for what they call “baseless” and “frivolous” election-fraud claims.
“Rather than withdraw or amend their Complaint, they chose to stand firm with their objectively false claims, ridiculously incompetent expert reports and patently unsupportable arguments,” the city argued in January in its request for sanctions.
The lawsuit in Michigan was one of dozens of bids by Trump’s legal team and his allies to reverse his loss to Biden in 2020.
Trump, who left office on Jan. 20, has never conceded the race to the Democratic president and continues to falsely claim the contest was rigged.
Powell had briefly looked to be a part of Trump’s legal team, appearing alongside the then-president’s onetime personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani at a bizarre press conference in mid-November. At that presser, Powell spuriously claimed voting software used in the election was linked to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader who died in 2013.
Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were used in numerous states in 2020, is currently suing Powell and Giuliani for defamation.
Last month, a New York court suspended Giuliani from practicing law, citing his numerous “false and misleading statements” about Trump’s election loss.
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.
