A federal judge temporarily suspended the admission of a Womble Bond partner to practice in his district after finding the attorney didn’t correct misrepresentations to a Dutch tribunal in parallel litigation, according to Law360.
Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the Western District of North Carolina (WDNC) held Pressly Millen in contempt and temporarily suspended him from practicing in the western district. Millen is also an attorney for a separate case involving the Allison Riggs campaign.
Millen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson is currently representing the Riggs campaign in elections protest litigation with the campaign of Republican candidate and NC Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin. In the unrelated case, the attorney was held in civil contempt for failing to correct an affidavit in litigation parallel to the WDNC judge’s jurisdiction.
The temporary suspension, in lieu of a standard disciplinary process, may indicate a more egregious example of unfixed falsities in the parallel case.
“It is obvious that Mr. Millen’s conduct was not as blatant as that of Mr. Meijboom, and compliance with the court’s order would have been much more difficult for Mr. Millen,” Judge Reidinger wrote.”But the fact remains that he materially failed to comply, and that his efforts to comply were no more than half measures. Not only did this cause the plaintiff to incur substantial expense, but these misrepresentations and the failure to correct them have delayed this case and the Dutch proceedings by many months, if not years.”
Judge Reidinger suspended Millen’s admission to the bar of the Western District of North Carolina for the duration of the case.
“This sanction, however, is imposed not as a punitive sanction but as a coercive one,” the judge said. “Mr. Millen can purge his contempt by certifying under oath and demonstrating to the satisfaction of the court that he [has] filed with the Dutch Court an affidavit, under oath, correcting the misstatements and omissions of his prior affidavit, as well as the misstatements and omissions made by Mr. Meijboom, and apologizing to the Dutch Court for such failures.”
The elections protest for which Millen is representing the Riggs campaign is hosted in the Eastern District of North Carolina.
Protest
Last week, Judge Richard Myers, the federal judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina handling the protest case, denied a temporary restraining order in the ballot dispute.
Griffin had sought the order to block the State Board of Elections from certifying Democrat Allison Riggs as the race’s winner.
“A motion for temporary restraining may only issue if the movant makes a clear showing of immediate injury,” US Chief District Judge Richard Myers wrote Friday.
The state elections board indicated “that no election certification will occur until January 3, 2025, or more likely January 6,” Myers wrote. Griffin is the plaintiff and the elections board is the defendant in the case.
“With notice of Defendants’ position, Plaintiff’s counsel responds in briefing that Defendants are ‘poised to certify the election results in a matter of days.’ The statements of counsel in briefing are not ‘specific facts in an affidavit or verified complaint,’ and the court finds that Plaintiff has failed to make a clear showing that he will suffer immediate injury before Defendant can be heard in opposition,” Myers explained.
Riggs, an appointed Democrat incumbent, leads Griffin by 734 votes in a race that has not yet been certified. She filed paperwork Thursday to intervene in the federal case.
Griffin filed a complaint last Wednesday urging the state Supreme Court to block the state elections board from counting “unlawful” ballots in the race. The elections board responded the following morning by removing the case to Myers’ federal courtroom.
“Justice Riggs won her 2024 general election contest against Judge Jefferson Griffin,” Riggs’ lawyers wrote Thursday. “Now, six weeks after more than 5.5 million North Carolinians cast their votes and elected both Democrats and Republicans to statewide offices, Judge Griffin seeks to throw out over 66,000 votes — more than one out of every hundred votes cast in North Carolina — in violation of federal and North Carolina law.”
Griffin’s court filing highlighted three categories of election protests: voters who registered without providing a driver’s license number or last four digits of a Social Security number, voters who never have lived in North Carolina, and overseas voters who did not provide photo identification.
“In response to these protests, the State Board and the opposing candidate, Justice Allison Riggs, have claimed that Judge Griffin is seeking a retroactive change in the election laws. That flatly mischaracterizes the timeline,” the court filing continued. “Our registration statutes required drivers license or social security numbers back in 2004. Our state constitution has imposed a residency requirement since 1776. And photo identification has been required for absentee voting since at least 2018. The laws that should have governed this election were, therefore, established long before this election. The State Board simply chose to break the law.”
In a Dec. 11 meeting, the state board rejected the three groups of protests Griffin mentioned in this week’s complaint. The Democrat-majority board voted 3-2 to reject protests based on incomplete voter registration data and nonresident voters. The board voted unanimously to reject protests involving overseas voters who did not provide photo ID.
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