The wackassery continues in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. This is perhaps unsurprising in a case where defense counsel actually got picked up on an outstanding warrant at the conclusion of a hearing. But the parties have kept the momentum going by finding new and creative ways to leak protected discovery to their allies.
Byrne is what would charitably be called a character. The less philanthropically inclined might call him a crank.
He “voluntarily” exited the company he founded after calling hedge fund manager Steven Cohen a “Sith lord” on an earnings call, being outed as Russian agent Maria Butina’s lover, and claiming that the FBI had recruited him for a sting operation against Hillary Clinton. He then went on to become one of the major vectors of election fraud lies after the 2020 election, which is how he wound up on the pointy end of litigation by the legal team which extracted $787 million from Fox for letting Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell spew nonsense on its airwaves.
Byrne was originally represented by Robert Driscoll from Dickinson Wright. But in March, he replaced Driscoll with Stefanie Lambert (AKA Stefanie Juntilla), a member of the infamous Kraken team who is currently under indictment in Michigan for breaching election equipment. About five seconds later, things went totally sideways.
Insisting that she’d discovered evidence of a crime — apparently some of the emails were in NOT ENGLISH! — Lambert turned over protected discovery materials to so-called “constitutional” Sheriff Dar Leaf, who promptly posted them online, claiming that they were evidence of criminal election fraud. Byrne has also reposted some internal Dominion communications to his own social media accounts.
Dominion tried to get Lambert disqualified, provoking this protest from the indicted attorney:
This [motion to disqualify] is indeed a “tactical” effort to stifle the truth and to prevent undersigned counsel who has introduced and presented corroborating expert analysis of the deficiencies in Dominion voting systems, and now has fulfilled her ethical duty to report the discovery of potential criminal violations to law enforcement. Dominion wants to disqualify undersigned because of her combined knowledge and the information she possesses from litigating cases in multiple jurisdictions, and with her expertise and knowledge, including multiple expert analyses of the deficiencies in Dominion voting systems’ product, and to prevent her from using her expertise and knowledge to defend Mr. Byrne, who has a right to retain and have qualified counsel defend him.
After Lambert and Byrne pinky promised not to violate discovery any more, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya allowed the lawyer to stay on the case. But that was not the end of the matter.
According to a motion to enforce the protective order filed on Friday, Lambert and Byrne are now using subpoenas from a criminal prosecution in Colorado to disseminate the protected discovery. That case involves former Mesa County election official Tina Peters, who is charged in connection with an alleged plot to secure a fake government ID for an election denial operative so that he could illegally image the county’s election equipment and infiltrate the manual upgrade of the voting equipment. Byrne has publicly claimed to be financing Peters’s defense, and so it is perhaps more than a little suspicious that Peters suddenly came up with the idea to subpoena Lambert for the protected discovery materials handed over by Dominion.
Last week, Lambert informed counsel for Dominion that she’d received the subpoena, and she appears to have complied with it, despite the unambiguous language of the protective order stating that the recipient of such a demand “must object to the production of the Confidential or Attorneys’ Eyes Only Discovery Material on the grounds of the existence of this Order.”
On top of this, Dominion CEO John Poulos was himself served with a subpoena related to the Peters prosecution on his way into a deposition in the Byrne case. Within minutes, Byrne posted a video of the service itself on Twitter, congratulating the process server Yehuda Miller, and calling him an “operative” for his company the America Project.
“Ms. Lambert is the only defense counsel across all the pending actions to be served with a subpoena in the Tina Peters case. And yet the information sought has nothing to do with Ms. Lambert or Mr. Byrne specifically, but rather Dominion,” the plaintiff argues. “Moreover, the subpoena is drafted to allow Ms. Lambert (the putative target of the subpoena) virtually unfettered, unilateral discretion to produce all of the documents produced by Dominion in this matter—and anything else she deems ‘relevant to the defense of Tina Peters.’”
As of this writing, Judge Upadhyaya has not signed the proposed order instructing Lambert to either contest the subpoena or admit that she complied with it. But it should make for another wild hearing!
US Dominion Inc. v. Byrne [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
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