Georgia Counties Ask Trump For Nearly $17,000 In Legal Fees For Disputing Election
Two Georgia counties are seeking nearly $17,000 in legal fees from Donald Trump after the former president made baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
DeKalb County is looking to recoup $6,105 in legal fees, while Cobb County is asking for $10,875 stemming from a lawsuit filed by Trump and Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer in the wake of the election results.
The lawsuit, filed in December against the Georgia State Election Board, the secretary of state and 15 county election supervisors, made claims of fraudulent activity in Georgia’s count during the election.
DeKalb County slammed the lawsuit for its ‘unsubstantiated and harassing claims’, arguing Trump and Shafer ‘continued to pursue this litigation after the election contest became moot, all without legal justification’. The county’s motion was filed by attorneys on behalf of Erica Hamilton, the director of voter registration and elections for the county, CNN reports.
Meanwhile, Cobb County noted that the fees it is demanding represents ‘just a fraction’ of the amount spent in the litigation.
Filed by attorney Daniel White on behalf of the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration and Janine Eveler, the director of the Cobb County Elections Department, the motion stated:
Given the number of failed lawsuits filed by the former President and his campaign, Petitioners apparently believed that they could file their baseless and legally deficient actions with impunity, with no regard for the costs extracted from the taxpayers’ coffers or the consequences to the democratic foundations of our country.
The filing added that the county was asking for the fees ‘in an effort to provide a modicum of accountability for the actions of Petitioners and to send a signal that similarly deficient contests filed in the future will face similar consequences’.
4 months agoWhite told CNN that while Cobb and DeKalb are currently the only counties pursuing reimbursement of legal fees from Trump, other Georgia countries are considering similar motions.
Trump continued to spout claims of voter fraud long after Joe Biden was named as president-elect, filing more than 30 legal challenges nationwide in an effort to overturn the results.
On January 2, during a phone call cited by CNN, Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ‘find’ 11,780 votes, claiming it would be ‘one more than we have, because we won the state’.
The former president alleged that the Georgia election results were off by ‘hundreds of thousands of votes’, though Raffensperger maintained that Georgia had an ‘accurate election’.
The Trump campaign ultimately withdrew the Georgia lawsuit in January.
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