Kari Lake's lawyers fined for false claims about Arizona election

Kari Lake launched an unsuccessful legal challenge of her election defeat

Lawyers for Kari Lake, the Republican who lost the Arizona governor's race last year, have been fined for making false statements about the election.

The state's top court ordered the 53-year-old's team to pay $2,000 (£1,585) for claiming that thousands of ballots had been "injected" into the total.

The court said the claim was unequivocally false.

Ms Lake alleged malpractice after losing to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the closely-watched race last November.

She is one of the most prominent Republicans to have shared the false claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and was endorsed by the former president who echoed her statements about wrongdoing in the Arizona vote despite there being no evidence to suggest it.

Ms Lake, who ultimately lost by a margin 17,000 votes, launched an unsuccessful legal challenge of her defeat. The court refused to hear the challenge in full, saying in March that there was no evidence ballots had been wrongly added to the final count.

She then challenged the decision to reject her case, with her lawyers saying it was an "undisputed fact" that "unaccounted for ballots" had appeared in the total.

Governor Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who is also a Democrat, sought legal sanctions over the claims.

"Sometimes campaigns and their attendant hyperbole spill over into legal challenges. But once a contest enters the judicial arena, rules of attorney ethics apply," Chief Justice Robert Brutinel wrote in his ruling on Thursday.

He denied a request, however, for Ms Lake to pay the legal fees for Governor Hobbs and Mr Fontes.

Kurt Olsen, a lawyer for Ms Lake, said in a statement that they "respectfully disagree" with the court's decision to impose sanctions.

Other elements of Ms Lake's challenge of her defeat remain active, with a lower court still considering a claim about the verification of signatures on early ballots.