Stayed Sanction For Election Challenge Suit

A stipulated sanction of a stayed suspension and probation has been approved by the Colorado Presiding Disciplinary Judge

People v. Gary D. Fielder. 24PDJ082. August 6, 2025.

The Presiding Disciplinary Judge approved the parties’ amended stipulation to discipline and suspended Gary D. Fielder (attorney registration number 19757) for eighteen months, all to be stayed upon Fielder’s successful completion of a two-year period of probation, with conditions. Fielder’s probation took effect on August 6, 2025.

In December 2020, Fielder and his co-counsel, who was not licensed to practice law in Colorado, signed and filed a class-action complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. The complaint named as plaintiffs eight U.S. citizens who were registered voters at the time of the 2020 presidential election. The defendants named in the complaint included Delaware corporations Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Facebook, Inc.; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg and Zuckerburg’s spouse, Priscilla Chan; Illinois non-profit Center for Tech and Civic Life; the governors and secretaries of state of Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; the governor of Wisconsin and members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission; and “Does 1-10,000, co-conspirators.” The complaint alleged that the defendants engaged in a concerted action to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. Fielder did not conduct an independent investigation into allegations in the complaint that were cited to news articles, complaints from other lawsuits, social media, and a purported forensic analysis report of voting hardware and software in Michigan.

In April 2021, the district court dismissed the case based on lack of standing. The defendants subsequently moved for sanctions against Fielder under F.R.C.P. 11, 28 U.S.C. section 1927, and the district court’s inherent authority. Following a hearing on sanctions, the district court granted the defendants’ motions and sanctioned Fielder and his co-counsel by awarding attorney’s fees, for which Fielder and his co-counsel were jointly and severally liable, due to the “woeful lack of investigation into the law and facts” and making “objectively frivolous legal claims,” including about standing and personal jurisdiction.

Respondent appealed the dismissal and the sanctions award to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The appellate court affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the claims, the reward of sanctions against Respondent, and the finding that there was no good-faith basis for asserting personal jurisdiction over the Michigan and Pennsylvania defendants in the District of Colorado. In December 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari that Fielder helped prepare and that his co-counsel filed with that court.

Through this misconduct, Fielder violated Colo. RPC 3.1 (a lawyer must not assert frivolous claims) and Colo. RPC 8.4(d) (it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice).

The case file is public per C.R.C.P. 242.41(a).

WTVB reported on sanctions imposed in the underlying litigation

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by two lawyers contesting a $187,000 financial sanction imposed on them by a judge who found they made recklessness and frivolous claims in litigation they brought seeking to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss as fraudulent.

The justices turned away the appeal by Ernest Walker and Gary Fielder, who had filed a lawsuit in Colorado accusing voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems, Meta’s Facebook and the Center for Tech and Civic Life nonprofit organization of working to steal the election from Trump. The judge who dismissed the suit ordered Walker and Fielder to pay the legal fees of the parties they sued.

The justices announced their action on the first day of their new nine-month term.

Trump’s campaign and allies filed a raft of failed lawsuits in numerous states seeking to undo the Republican businessman-turned-politician’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The suits were based on Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. Walker and Fielder in their lawsuit represented eight voters from five states.

U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter in August 2021 imposed the sanctions on Walker and Fielder over the suit that was filed in federal court in December 2020, the month after the election.

“This lawsuit was filed with a woeful lack of investigation into the law and, under the circumstances, the facts,” Neureiter wrote. “The lawsuit put into or repeated into the public record highly inflammatory and damaging allegations that could have put individuals’ safety in danger. Doing so without a valid legal basis or serious independent personal investigation into the facts was the height of recklessness.”

The lawsuit, the judge concluded, was “one enormous conspiracy theory” and arguments made by the lawyers “crossed the border into the frivolous.”

The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year affirmed the sanction based on the “inherent power” of judges and also a federal law that states that a lawyer can be held liable for costs for “unreasonably and vexatiously” extending a court case.

The 10th Circuit in its ruling said “an attorney is expected to exercise judgment, and must ‘regularly re-evaluate the merits’ of claims and ‘avoid prolonging meritless claims.’”

Trump’s allies made false claims that Denver-based Dominion’s ballot-counting machines were used to manipulate the election in favor of Biden. Fox Corp and Fox News, which aired those claims, in April settled a defamation lawsuit by Dominion for $787.5 million, averting a trial.

Fielder and Walker, in asking the Supreme Court to hear their case, said in a legal filing that they “behaved with decorum and timeliness. Every pleading was filed within the rules of professional conduct.”

Fielder and Walker told the justices that “by sanctioning counsel in this regard, citizens and lawyers will both hesitate to vindicate their rights, and the rights of others in similar situations.”

Dominion and the other defendants waived any response to the petition by Fielder and Walker to the Supreme Court.

Fielder and Walker were among other lawyers who either were hit with sanctions or faced attorney-misconduct complaints for legal work on lawsuits challenging Trump’s loss. Some of those pending sanctions cases involve lawyers more closely in Trump’s orbit, including his former counsel Rudolph Giuliani and ally Sidney Powell.

(Mike Frisch)