A lawyer representing a man who claimed that voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems gamed its machines to help President Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential race against Donald Trump has been admonished by a judge for “repeated misconduct.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya ruled on August 13 that Stepfanie Lambert could no longer represent her client, Patrick Byrne. Byrne is the former CEO of the company Overstock, an online retailer of furnishings and other household goods. Byrne had claimed that Dominion rigged its voting machines to make sure Donald Trump did not win.
Dominion then sued Byrne for $1.9 billion for defamation in 2021. Two years later, Stefanie Lambert began representing him, and this was shortly after she herself had been indicted in Michigan. The felony charges against her? That she tried to get access to voting machines to prove her suspicion that the 2020 election was swayed in Biden’s favor.
Judge Upadhyaya ruled on Tuesday that Lambert could no longer represent Byrne because she had a pattern of disregarding court instructions and failing to uphold her duty as an attorney. Lambert is accused of violating a confidentiality order by giving a Michigan sheriff private information from Dominion; she claimed the information demonstrated that Serbians working for the company were part of an effort to game the 2020 outcome.
In her ruling, the judge wrote that Lambert had not substantiated her allegations against Dominion, and there was no evidence that the company committed any “national security crimes.” All Lambert presented was speculation, according to the judge. But whether she could prove her claims or not, there was no legal defense available to the lawyer that would allow her to get away with disregarding court-imposed confidentiality orders.
While it is unusual to remove a lawyer from a case, Upadhyaya wrote, she felt obligated to do so given the danger that Lambert would continue to release private information to the public, and she had already severely compromised the case.
Indeed, said the judge, Lambert’s conduct so far raised the question of whether her sole purpose for getting involved in the case was “gaining access to” and “publicly sharing” protected documents from Dominion Voting Systems.
