Indicted pro-Trump lawyer who leaked emails is removed from Dominion suit

A pro-Trump lawyer facing criminal charges for illegally accessing Michigan voting machines after the 2020 election was disqualified Tuesday from representing former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne after a judge found her and Byrne responsible for leaking up to 1 million confidential records turned over in a separate defamation lawsuit.

Stefanie Lambert was barred from representing Byrne, a prominent funder of adherents of election misinformation, in a $1.6 billion damages lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, the target of false attacks over former president Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya of Washington disqualified Lambert over violations beginning last March with her disclosure of Dominion emails to a county sheriff in southwestern Michigan and to a court filing in her own criminal case in Michigan, despite a court order requiring that records in the defamation case be kept confidential.

“The record clearly shows that Lambert deliberately violated multiple court rules and orders and continues to do so despite having had ample warning of the consequences and assuring the Court she would comply,” Upadhyaya said, raising the “serious concern” that she joined Byrne’s legal team “for the sheer purpose of gaining access to and publicly sharing Dominion’s protected discovery.”

The judge wrote that Lambert’s “truly egregious misconduct” warranted disqualification because ithad already marredand would undoubtedly continue to “infect future proceedings.”

Byrne also violated confidentiality orders in the case, the judge wrote, but the scope of his actions and any penalties sought by Dominion were to be determined.

The courtroom punishment shows how legal consequences continue to pile up for many allies who amplified Trump’s false 2020 election claims 3½ years after he attempted to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory, even as top Republicans led by Trump have refused to commit to accept November’s election results with 12 weeks to go until Election Day.

Still, Byrne — who has funded efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election — has continued to attempt to use evidence disclosed in the litigation to push false accusations against Dominion, while claiming that law enforcement would face “a piano wire and a blowtorch” if they did not drop a case against an ally, who a Colorado jury found guilty on Monday.

Lambert said Tuesday that Byrne will file an “immediate appeal” of Upadhyaya’s decision. Byrne did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dominion has won settlements of $787.5 million from Fox News for airing baseless claims that its voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election against Trump and for Biden, and it has sued seeking similar $1 billion-plus damage payouts from Byrne, conservative businessman Mike Lindell, and former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

In December, Byrne hired Lambert, a lawyer who tried to upend Trump’s loss in Michigan and who is also known as Stefanie Lambert Junttila. She was charged in August 2023 with four state felony counts of accessing voting machines in 2020 in a fruitless search for evidence of a conspiracy theory against Trump. Lambert’s repeated defiance of court authorities while under criminal prosecution have created more drama in the key 2024 swing state and in D.C., where her civil and criminal cases have become entangled.

Lambert did not appear for a March 7 hearing in her criminal case, prompting a bench warrant for her arrest. She was taken into custody by U.S. marshals in Washington after a hearing in Byrne’s civil case March 19 and was released on an unsecured $10,000 bond by a D.C. Superior Court judge. She was ordered to turn herself in to the police in Michigan.

Right before her arrest, Lambert admitted in Byrne’s case that despite a court order to protect the confidentiality of Dominion records in the case, she shared some with Dar Leaf, a county sheriff in southwestern Michigan who was investigated as part of the alleged voting machine plot. More than 2,000 pages of the documents were posted to an account under Leaf’s name on X the previous weekend. Lambert cited the contents of the disclosures to argue that the case against her in Michigan is illegitimate.

Dominion urged the court in Washington to remove her from the case, saying it sued Byrne and others “to stop the lies, to end the threats of violence” against its employees but that Lambert was “using these very lawsuits … to spread yet more lies and do yet more harm.” The company said Lambert’s actions “should shock the conscience” and continued to undermine the integrity of the legal and election systems.

Lambert alleged that they were proof that “Dominion conspired with foreign nationals in Serbia” to undermine the U.S. election system. Echoing his argument to the court, Byrne wrote on X that Lambert “signed an NDA, but she found evidence of ongoing crime, and reported it to law enforcement. If she found a severed head in discovery box she had a duty to report it to law-enforcement, too.”

Dominion’s attorneys responded that this was a “xenophobic conclusion” based only on the fact that the company has some overseas employees. A company spokeswoman added in an email that “any allegation that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election is flatly false.”

Lambert argued that Byrne was entitled to share “national security information” with law enforcement. Byrne left the company he founded in 2019.

Byrne has since become a prominent source of false claims about the past election, and he met with Trump and others at the White House to discuss ways to keep Biden from taking office.

Dominion was alerted to the leaks by Byrne’s former attorney, Robert Driscoll, whotold the court that he learned about the disclosures through social media and asked Lambert to prevent them. He and his firm left Lambert’s case March 12 but continue to represent him in other matters.

Lambert was involved in former Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s unsuccessful lawsuits to block certification of the 2020 election results, and records indicate both were involved in efforts to access voting machine data in Georgia and Michigan. Powell has pleaded guilty in Georgia state court to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties. A description of an unindicted co-conspirator in the Georgia case, in which Trump and others are described as engaging in a racketeering scheme, matches Lambert.

Separately on May 9, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced additional felony charges against Lambert and former Adams Township clerk Stephanie Scott, alleging that they accessed voting systems without authorization in search of fraud. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Lambert is tentatively set for trial in her first Michigan case in October. Trial dates have not been set in her second case or in Dominion’s case against Byrne.