The conservative group Project Veritas was ordered on Thursday to pay Stanford University nearly $150,000 in legal fees after a federal judge dismissed the activist organization’s defamation lawsuit against the California school.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly of Seattle federal court awarded Stanford’s attorneys at the firms Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Miller Nash the full amount they requested in June following the dismissal of the complaint.

An academic blog post in September 2020 from a Stanford-affiliated nonpartisan coalition called the Election Integrity Partnership was at the heart of Project Veritas’ lawsuit.

The blog post questioned a Project Veritas report about alleged “ballot harvesting” in Minnesota. Zilly’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit said “the phrases in the blog post that Project Veritas challenges as defamatory are nonactionable opinions.”

A spokesperson for Project Veritas on Friday said “Stanford was handed a dismissal on the basis that it published a report the court deemed non-factual — and now obtained a mandatory award of fees. Words have meaning, and we are appealing.”

The group’s challenge is pending in the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Project Veritas opposed Stanford’s bid for fees.

Two lawyers for Project Veritas — Joel Ard of Ard Law Group and Libby Locke of Clare Locke — did not immediately respond to a request on Friday seeking comment.

Stanford and a spokesperson from the Election Integrity Partnership did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Pillsbury partner Sarah Flanagan in San Francisco, and Miller Nash’s Brian Esler in Seattle, who represent Stanford, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In court filings, Stanford said its bid request for $150,000 was tied to the school’s effort to dismiss the case.

“This amount represents just a portion of the roughly $290,000 in total attorneys’ fees paid by Stanford in defending this action and the repeated threats of litigation by Project Veritas that preceded it,” the university’s lawyers told the court.

Flanagan, who regularly bills at $1,290 hourly, charged $891 an hour as a discount, filings in the case show. Pillsbury counsel Lee Brand, whose standard rate is $945 an hour, billed at $718 hourly in the litigation.