Dozens of judges around the country have already thrown out former President Donald Trump's false voter-fraud claims — but it shouldn't stop there. The legal teams that brought those claims engaged in transparent malfeasance, baselessly promoting wild conspiracy theories, touting affidavits from witnesses who saw nothing, and slandering election officials and voting-system companies. They did all this not in a genuine effort to win their cases (they were self-evidently unwinnable), but to foment public distrust in the election process and rally Trump's base. This is a textbook definition of "abuse of process," a punishable infraction in the legal system.

A judge in Michigan is now considering sanctions against nine former Trump lawyers, including potential disbarment and legal fees. Similar actions may — and should — play out in other states. What this small army of anti-democracy attack dogs did should cost attorneys so they will think twice going forward about engaging in such an egregious abuse of the court system.

It's not inherently improper for lawyers to make arguments in court that are precarious or even quixotic. But what Trump's attorneys did, in courtrooms around the country, went far beyond that. Their effort to overturn the election results in Michigan, for example, was based almost entirely upon affidavits from supposed witnesses who, it's clear from the affidavits themselves, witnessed nothing.

One of them was from a man who said he saw plastic bags being loaded onto a mail truck and that he believed they "could be ballots" headed for Detroit. Another was from a witness who claimed to be a former military intelligence expert who had discovered computer-server evidence of election tampering from Iran and China. He offered no evidence, and a Washington Post investigation found he never worked in military intelligence. Clearly, minimal standards of lawyerly due diligence weren't applied.

After Trump's lawyers lost their election-fraud suits in Michigan, Detroit officials sought sanctions against the lawyers for their bad-faith filings. Their claim is still playing out, but U.S. District Judge Linda V. Parker this week called Trump's attorneys' arguments "fantastical" and demanded to know: "How could any of you as officers of the court present this type of an affidavit?"

As it happens, one of the former Trump attorneys, Sidney Powell, has already answered that question. In a separate defamation suit against her by a company that makes vote-counting machines, Powell's attorneys are arguing in her defense that her malicious lies about the company can't be slanderous because no reasonable person would believe the things she was saying.

It's yet another indication that Powell and her cohorts never expected to win. What they sought was publicity in order to sow election distrust among conservatives. On that front, polls show, they won. This is a poison that could plague America's democracy for years to come. Those who administered it should never practice law again.

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