Censured for ‘Misrepresentations’ About a ‘Stolen’ Election, a Former Trump Lawyer Insists She Never Lied

Two weeks after the 2020 presidential election, three Trump campaign lawyers held a bizarre press conference that laid bare the lunacy of the president’s claim that systematic fraud had denied him a second term. Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani described an elaborate criminal conspiracy involving Dominion Voting Systems, tricky software, phony ballots, election officials across the country, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, and “communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China.”

Compared to Powell and Giuliani, the third lawyer, Jenna Ellis, seemed relatively sane, urging patience as the campaign’s post-election lawsuits worked their way through the courts. But as Ellis conceded in a statement released on Wednesday, she joined Powell and Giuliani in making false claims about election fraud, even if she did so less frequently and flamboyantly.

In response to a complaint from the 65 Project, a group that seeks professional discipline of lawyers who promoted Trump’s stolen-election fantasy, Colorado Presiding Disciplinary Judge Bryon M. Large publicly censured Ellis for violating a rule of professional conduct that prohibits “reckless, knowing, or intentional misrepresentations by attorneys.” In the stipulation that accompanied the censure, Ellis admitted that she had made 10 “misrepresentations” while “serving as counsel for the Trump campaign and personal counsel to President Trump.”

Even at that crazy press conference on November 19, Ellis gave Powell and Giuliani credibility by describing them as members of “an elite strikeforce team that is working on behalf of the President and the campaign to make sure that our Constitution is protected.” She rebuked “fake news” organizations for assuming that the campaign had no evidence to support its fraud claims and promised it would produce that evidence in due course.

“Putting on evidence takes time,” Ellis said. “This is basically an opening statement so the American people can understand what the networks have been hiding and what they refuse to cover, because all of your fake news headlines are dancing around the merits of this case and are trying to de-legitimize what we are doing here.”

What were they doing? “Our objective is to make sure to preserve and protect election integrity,” Ellis said. “This is about maintaining free and fair elections in this country. It is not about overturning an outcome. It is about making sure that election integrity is preserved, and every American should want that.”

Without explicitly embracing Powell and Giuliani’s conspiracy theory, Ellis intimated that something had gone horribly wrong in the way