Sidney Powell quotes Buzz Lightyear in response to sanctions request for her election conspiracy-theory lawsuit

• Sidney Powell asked a judge to turn down a motion for sanctions against her in Wisconsin.
• She made the argument on a technicality and quoted "Toy Story" in her legal filing.
• Powell pushed lawsuits based on conspiracy theories in a failed attempt to overturn the election.

The conspiracy theorist and former Trump attorney Sidney Powell said a judge should dismiss Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers' filing for sanctions against her, arguing he waited too long and using a quote from "Toy Story" to bolster her case.

Powell's motion, filed Thursday, is a response to the Democratic governor's request in March to have Powell and her associates pay $106,000 to cover legal fees over her failed lawsuit to throw out presidential-election votes in his state.

Powell fought the sanctions request on procedural grounds.

"Defendant would have this Court make new law, create an exception for a baseless and untimely motion, which - with no precedent in the case law or any rule - could extend the time for filing a sanctions motion 'to infinity and beyond' to harass a plaintiff in what amounts to nothing more than political grandstanding," she wrote in the legal motion.

The sentence included a footnote that said "Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story (Pixar 1995)."

Her lawsuit was part of a group of failed lawsuits she nicknamed the "Kraken," which sought to overturn 2020 election results in states that President Donald Trump lost. They were premised on false conspiracy theories that held Dominion and Smartmatic, two unrelated election-technology companies, were secretly in cahoots with each other through the machinations of Hugo Chávez, a dead Venezuelan president, to flip results from Trump to now-President Joe Biden.

Before filing those lawsuits on her own, Powell was a member of Trump's election-litigation team, which also failed and which she was fired from.

Numerous independent commissions, audits, and judicial decisions have shown that the 2020 election results were not marred by widespread voter fraud, as Trump and Powell alleged.

"Instead of evidence and legal argument, Plaintiff offered a tangled web of irrelevant (and inaccurate) conspiracy theories, ultimately suggesting that Dominion voting machines had altered individual votes to favor Joseph R. Biden, Jr.," attorneys for Evers wrote in March. "Plaintiff advanced this conspiracy theory without factual support and, worse still, deliberately ignored definitive proof disproving his allegations."

The motion from Evers also targeted Trump's attorneys for their lawsuits, seeking $144,000 in sanctions, Insider's Kelly McLaughlin previously reported.

Additionally, Powell is facing sanctions in Michigan, where she filed another "Kraken" lawsuit. The city of Detroit is seeking to have her disbarred in the state.

Legal-ethics experts previously told Insider Powell could warrant sanctions for including plaintiffs who didn't appear to agree to be part of her lawsuits and for appearing to manipulate evidence included in them.

She is also the target of separate defamation lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, which are collectively seeking billions of dollars in damages for her baseless allegations.