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Kraken lawyer Stefanie Lambert is at it again. She already managed to get herself arrested on a state warrant at the conclusion of a hearing in federal court — she was the lawyer in that one. And the Michigan attorney has been working doggedly to top herself ever since.
Lambert’s client is Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com and former paramour of Russian spy Maria Buttina. Since 2020, Byrne has bankrolled efforts to overturn President Biden’s electoral victory, spouting ever-wackier conspiracy theories about how the fraud was engineered. Last Thursday he held forth on a Twitter livestream where he claimed to have hacked the Venezuelan government:
What I’ve really been doing for the last two years abroad is I’ve been hacking the government of Venezuela and I have it all at this point. I have everything. And it’s kind of funny, somewhere along the way, somebody told me — I got kicked out. I was operating in a foreign countries and I hired a bunch of professional hackers and we hacked the government of Venezuela, and I have everything.
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Byrne for defamation, along with Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani. A freethinker like Byrne was never going to be content with a normie lawyer, and so in March he swapped out Dickinson Wright’s Robert Driscoll for Lambert, a fellow traveller in conspiracy land.
Lambert is facing multiple indictments in her native Michigan for election-related crimes, and her first action after (or perhaps before) entering her appearance in Byrne’s case in DC was to hand over protected discovery to her election-denying allies, specifically a “constitutional sheriff” from rural Michigan named Dar Leaf.
What followed has been a bizarre dance between Lambert, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya, and Susman Godfrey’s Davida Brooks, who represents Dominion and is now having to deal with opposing counsel who is nuttier than squirrel shit.
Lambert insists that she has the right to alert law enforcement about “crimes” revealed in protected discovery — by which she means emails in a language other than English. Judge Upadhyaya told Lambert to knock it off, and Brooks moved to disqualify Lambert, arguing that the lawyer and her client could never be trusted to appropriately handle confidential discovery, and would just come up with more creative ways to leak it.
Lambert responded by seemingly engineering a subpoena in a Colorado criminal case for discovery materials in the Dominion civil matter. The Colorado case involves Tina Peters, a former election clerk who is charged in a plot to sneak one of Byrne’s operatives in to image a Dominion machine using a stolen government ID. During his recent Twitter rant, Byrne said “If you have any brains at all, which I’m not sure they do, they should be throwing in the towel and just surrendering and dropping this case against Tina because those who don’t are going to end up facing a piano wire and blowtorch before this is over. So I know that’s probably another felony, but f— it — threatening them like that — but there we are.”
Probably!
The clear terms of the protective order required Lambert to contest the Peters subpoena. But she refused to say whether she had done so, or if she’d taken advantage of the brief period between when the subpoena was served and when it was quashed to give Peters’ counsel access to the Dominion discovery. Citing attorney-client privilege, Lambert refused to say if she disclosed the company’s internal emails, but assured the court that Peters’s attorney John Case signed a confidentiality agreement, so it’s totes cool.
Last week, Lambert moved to file a surreply to Dominion’s response to the motion to enforce the protective order. She cited no reason other than her own busy schedule, but did attest that she’d “discussed the anticipated motion with opposing counsel in a good-faith effort to determine whether there is an opposition to the relief sought,” and Dominion opposed. Judge Upadhyaya reluctantly granted Lambert permission to file a surreply by Friday, but on Friday, Lambert simply docketed a request for an extension, noting that “her appearance is required at multiple depositions this week.”
But Davida Brook did get her homework in on time, and it was WILD.
The supplemental motion in support of Dominion’s bid to enforce its protective order and get Lambert off the case quoted Byrne’s Twitter rant at length, including a passage where he called one Dominion employee “a Cuban intelligence officer.” Dominion claims that Byrne and Lambert regularly work to intimidate witnesses, with Lambert’s behavior veering into the bizarre.
In a section captioned “Improper Activity at Recent Deposition,” they write:
In depositions of Dominion employees, Ms. Lambert is consistently disruptive. Instead of appearing at the beginning, Ms. Lambert joins each deposition by zoom, at some random point, without prior notice, and without announcing herself. She keeps her camera turned off even while questioning the witness. During last Friday’s deposition, Ms. Lambert went further.
Defendants were deposing a Dominion employee, a United States citizen who happens to have been born and raised in a foreign country. As usual, Ms. Lambert was not present when the deposition began. Twenty minutes in, she appeared on the zoom, camera off, with the screen name “Prosecutor.” Dominion’s counsel refused to re-start the deposition until Ms. Lambert, who is not a prosecutor, changed her screen name. Although Ms. Lambert initially claimed she did not know how to, not surprisingly, Ms. Lambert was able to change her screen name quickly once she realized the deposition would not move forward until she did.
And while her client was copping to felonies and threatening bodily harm to his enemies, Lambert was making what appears to be a blatant misrepresentation to the court. Because she had not met and conferred with Dominion, as she’d attested in her motion to file a surreply.
“I have canvassed our team and it appears that you did not confer with anyone for Dominion, much less get a response,” Susman lawyer Jonathan Ross wrote on Friday night. “Please correct the record with the Court over the weekend so we do not have to on Monday.”
Lambert replied shortly after: “I apologize. I was traveling with bad Internet and my email to your office did not go through.” But when asked for a screenshot of the purported email, which would not have represented conferral even if sent, Lambert never responded. And when informed that Dominion intended to tell Judge Upadhyaya about the discrepacy, the “Prosecutor” fired off a completely manic surreply in which she repeated the claim about the unsent email and accused opposing counsel of “seek[ing] to invade attorney-client privilege in an effort to reign [sic] in these privileged and confidential matters under this Court’s protective order.”
Yesterday Judge Upadhyaya reiterated once again that discovery materials are not to be distributed to non-parties.
Even though it appears that the Colorado court has granted motions to quash the subpoenas at issue, this Court will make abundantly clear that Defendant and his Counsel are expressly prohibited from sharing Dominion’s discovery anywhere outside this case absent express Court order. This order applies to ALL of the discovery that Plaintiffs have produced in this litigation. It likewise applies to ALL of Defendant Byrne’s counsel who have gained access to Plaintiffs’ discovery, including Ms. Lambert and Mr. John Case.
Well! Surely that will be the end of the matter and there will be no further spillage in this case.
LOL.
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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