Jenna Ellis, former attorney for then-President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, has been censured in Colorado after admitting she repeated false statements about the election.
Ellis acknowledged making 10 of what she called “misrepresentations” on television and Twitter after Trump lost the 2020 election to now-President Biden. The office of attorney regulation counsel in Colorado, where Ellis is from, said the statements included claiming on Fox News on December 5, 2020 that in Arizona “we have over 500,000 votes that were cast illegally,” as well as saying on Newsmax on December 15 that Trump was “the true and proper victor.”
Less than three weeks after the election, Ellis appeared on former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Newsmax show where, referring to Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, she said, “With all those states combined we know that the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that.”
Ellis’ falsehoods echoed lies expressed by Trump himself. Last year’s House Select January 6 Committee concluded that it was with the backing of the so-called “Big Lie”—that Trump had won the election and not Biden—that Trump, in the words of Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack” on the U.S. Capitol while Congress was certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021.
Further, Ellis is just one of numerous pro-Trump attorneys who’ve been penalized for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. For example, nine lawyers in Michigan in 2021 were ordered to pay $175,000 in sanctions for a sham lawsuit seeking to overturn the results in that state.
And Trump’s ex-attorney Rudy Giuliani faces ethics charges from the DC Board of Professional Responsibility over his actions with the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania. The former New York City Mayor also had his New York law license suspended in June 2021 after a state appeals court ruled he had made “demonstrably false and misleading” statements about voter fraud.
That same DC Board on Tuesday filed an ethics complaint against Stefan Passantino, the attorney who represented former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson in the early stages of the January 6 Committee’s investigation, accusing him of the crimes of subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and bribery.
Further, the State Bar in California in January levied disciplinary charges on attorney John Eastman for his efforts to overturn the election. He faces possible disbarment.
Ellis is based in Washington DC, but she has also practiced law in her home state of Colorado. In a tweet Thursday she accused Democrats and Never Trumpers of political motivations.
She also released a statement from her attorney, Michael Melito, that said, “My client remains a practicing attorney in good standing in the State of Colorado. In a very heated political climate, we secured that correct outcome.”
