A federal judge recently barred an election-denying lawyer from one of Dominion Voting Systems’ 2020 election defamation cases after she publicly leaked the company’s internal emails. The move comes amid several cases of alleged election interference amongst high-profile officials and executives close to former President Donald Trump.
Stefanie Lambert represented Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne in the lawsuit filed by Dominion due to Byrne’s repeated accusations that the company rigged the 2020 elections against Trump.
Judge Moxila Upadhyaya said in the 62-page ruling that she was removing Lambert from the case because of her “truly egregious misconduct," saying that she “repeatedly disregarded court orders” by publicly disclosing “thousands, if not millions” of internal Dominion documents without legal justification. Lambert leaked Dominion emails to a right-wing Michigan sheriff, Dar Leaf, who investigated unfounded theories about the 2020 election and then posted private contact information about Dominion staffers online.
Upadhyaya wrote in her ruling that “Byrne and Lambert’s acts have not only fueled theories of wide scale election fraud and crime … they have resulted in real harm and threats to Dominion employees.”
Who are Stephanie Lambert and Patrick Byrne?
Lambert and Byrne are both Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 election results and have pushed false claims about Dominion software manipulating the outcome.
Lambert is facing criminal charges in Michigan over her role in allegedly conspiring to seize voting machines in 2020. Lambert was a defense lawyer in Detroit who worked mainly on routine criminal cases before jumping on the voter fraud bandwagon and pushing conspiracy theories about the election. In her home state of Michigan, she joined lawsuits on behalf of Trump supporters, challenging President Joe Biden’s legitimate victory and seeking to impound voting machines across the state.
Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, has been investigated for advising Trump on overturning the election, along with other notable advisors such as Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani. He also spoke at the January 6 rally before the attack on the Capitol and donated $1 million to the nonprofit The American Project, which pushed election fraud theories. Perhaps more notably, however, was Byrne’s romantic involvement with convicted Russian spy Maria Butina, who was convicted in 2018 on charges that she acted as an agent of Russia to advance “the interests of the Russian Federation” in the United States.
Many pro-Trump lawyers and officials have faced consequences for attempting to alter the outcome of the 2020 election, including losing law licenses or facing ongoing defamation suits.
