MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell not only lost his latest motion to overturn a defamation verdict related to the 2020 election — the judge also said lawyers for the media company he founded must explain why they shouldn’t be fined and referred to their state bars for disciplinary proceedings.

The double defeat came Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Nina Wang, a Joe Biden appointee in Colorado. She presided over the civil case in which a jury found the Minnesota gubernatorial hopeful and his media company, Frankspeech, liable for defaming Eric Coomer. The plaintiff had worked for Dominion Voting Systems, a voting technology company targeted by Donald Trump supporters in connection with the election he lost to Biden.

Wang rejected the post-trial motion challenging the verdict, which totaled over $2 million against Lindell and Frankspeech. Through that company, Lindell broadcast his show, which included statements about Coomer that led to this lawsuit. In her ruling, the judge recounted Coomer testifying that Lindell’s statements accusing him of election-rigging made the plaintiff unlikely to ever work in anything election-related again.

To be sure, the decision wasn’t a total loss for the Lindell crew, as the judge also rejected the plaintiff’s motion to increase the damages.

Yet the actions of Frankspeech’s lawyers in defending against that motion led the judge to raise ethical concerns. Wang noted that, in their response to the plaintiff’s motion to increase the damages, defense lawyers Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster cited a case as having been decided by a federal appeals court. But the judge observed that it was actually a trial-level ruling that the lawyers misleadingly described, to boot.

“A reasonable review by counsel should have alerted them of the error,” Wang wrote.

Incredibly, this sort of thing wasn’t a one-off.

The judge pointed out that she had already sanctioned the defense lawyers for “this exact type of error,” which the lawyers had said then was due to the use of artificial intelligence and mistakenly filing the wrong draft.

“The Court cannot ignore this reoccurring conduct simply because the trial is over,” Wang wrote Wednesday.

“Regardless of whether generative artificial intelligence was used or not,” she wrote, the federal appeals court covering Colorado “has been clear that an attorney has a ‘fundamental duty’ to the Court to confirm that all legal authorities in submissions to the Court are accurately cited, reflect accurate quotations, and stand for the propositions for which they are cited.”

The judge bolded the phrase “fundamental duty.”

She deemed it “inexplicable” how these errors happened “yet again” — she bolded that phrase, too — after previously reminding the lawyers of their professional obligations. Recalling that she had sanctioned them $3,000 each, she wrote Wednesday that her actions thus far seemed to have had “little, if any, remedial impact.”

The judge therefore gave Kachouroff and DeMaster until April 8 to convince her why they shouldn’t be sanctioned further “for their continued failure to check their citations” as required by court rules, and why they shouldn’t be referred to their state bars in Virginia and Wisconsin, respectively, for disciplinary proceedings.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

The post Mike Lindell loses bid to overturn defamation verdict. Plus, his lawyers face sanctions. appeared first on MS NOW.