An attorney for former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne was detained at the federal courthouse in Washington on Monday after defending her decision to disseminate internal documents from Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to revive long-debunked claims about the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
Stefanie Lambert was facing a bench warrant from a state court in Michigan, where she is accused of taking part in a conspiracy to tamper with voting machines in hopes of finding proof of fraud. She is simultaneously representing Byrne, who is being sued for defamation by Dominion over related falsehoods claiming the firm\u2019s machines enabled vote tampering.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Marshals office in a statement confirmed Lambert was arrested on Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n
In D.C. court Monday, Lambert admitted that she made public emails she obtained as Byrne\u2019s lawyer and shared them with a southwestern Michigan sheriff who was also investigated as part of that alleged plot. Over 2,000 pages of the documents were put on the social media site X this month by an account using the sheriff\u2019s name and photograph.<\/p>\n
Dominion requested Lambert be removed from the case following the release of the documents.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been nearly four years. When does it stop?\u201d Dominion attorney Davida Brook asked in court. She said the company brought suits against Byrne and others \u201cto stop the lies, to end the threats of violence.\u201d Now, she said, Lambert was \u201cusing these very lawsuits \u2026 to spread yet more lies and do yet more harm.\u201d Dominion employees have received a fresh round of violent threats as a result of the disclosures, Brook said.<\/p>\n
Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya said she needed more time to decide whether Lambert should be removed from the case. But the judge said that in the meantime, both Lambert and Byrne could not access to discovery materials, and that Lambert must move to seal the Michigan court document containing Dominion\u2019s records.<\/p>\n
After the hearing ended, the other attorneys left while Lambert was asked by the judge to stay behind. Several U.S. Marshals then entered the courtroom and locked the door behind them. Lambert never left through the public courtroom entrance; there is another exit through which detained individuals are transported.<\/p>\n
Lambert\u2019s Michigan defense attorney, Daniel Hartman, declined to speak on her whereabouts Monday but said that her failure to appear in court in Michigan \u201cwas not willful.\u201d Instead he said it was because of \u201cmixed messages\u201d about whether she had to get fingerprinted while challenging the court\u2019s orders. Just before Lambert appeared in court in D.C., Hartman asked the Michigan judge to reconsider the warrant for her arrest. \u201cTo compound onto this entire tragedy, you have an arrest warrant that probably shouldn\u2019t be issued,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Lambert only recently became Byrne\u2019s lead attorney in Washington, but she said in court that she had been helping with the case since late last year and gained access to the documents sometime \u201cafter the holidays.\u201d Given that she had them for weeks, if not months, Upadhyaya asked why Lambert did not file a motion to undo a protective order, which the lawyer signed, barring disclosure of those documents to anyone not involved in the case.<\/p>\n
Lambert responded that she was under no obligation to adhere to the protective order because the emails contained \u201cevidence of a crime,\u201d suggesting the situation was analogous to being handed \u201ca dead body\u201d as part of the case discovery. Specifically, she alleged that they were proof that \u201cDominion conspired with foreign nationals in Serbia\u201d to undermine the U.S. election system. Dominion\u2019s attorneys responded that this was a \u201cxenophobic conclusion\u201d based only on the fact that the company has some overseas employees. A Dominion spokeswoman added in an email that \u201cany allegation that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election is flatly false.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lambert said in court that she gave only Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf access to the Dominion case discovery storage, which Brook said totals over a million pages. But Lambert said Leaf shared the documents with other sheriffs and members of Congress. Leaf, who has not been charged in the Michigan case, did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Lambert said Byrne shared the documents with \u201cthe U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office.\u201d She said she did not know which one; there are nearly 100 U.S. attorneys running federal prosecutors\u2019 offices across the country. Lambert argued that Byrne is \u201ca national intelligence asset\u201d who was entitled to \u201cnational security information\u201d with law enforcement. Byrne has claimed he was instructed by the FBI to pursue a romantic relationship with Maria Butina, a Russian national who was convicted of being an unregistered foreign agent in 2019. (Former FBI officials have called Byrne\u2019s claims \u201cridiculous.\u201d) He did not appear in court Monday; asked about the documents he said by text message, \u201cI\u2019m just a humble concerned citizen.\u201d Upadhyaya said he must be in court for the next hearing on whether his lawyer should face penalties.<\/p>\n
Right now, Upadhyaya said, her goal was \u201cto prevent further bleeding\u201d of protected information into the public sphere. \u201cI will deal with the \u2018why\u2019 later,\u201d she said. But, she told Lambert, \u201cthe analogy of the dead body rings hollow to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dominion was alerted to the leaks by Byrne\u2019s previous attorney, Robert Driscoll, who told them that he had \u201casked Ms. Lambert to take immediate steps and reasonable efforts to prevent further disclosure of Confidential Discovery Material.\u201d He added that he \u201chad no advance knowledge\u201d of the disclosure, only learning about it when the documents appeared on social media. One such post had already been viewed over 150,000 times by Monday afternoon, Brook said: \u201cThe cat is out of the bag.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lambert\u2019s criminal trial is set to begin next month. A trial date has not been set in the Dominion case. The company last year settled a similar suit with Fox News for $787 million dollars, and is also suing former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell along with the right-wing television station OAN and the pillow businessman Mike Lindell.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
An attorney for former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne was detained at the federal courthouse in Washington on Monday after defending her decision to disseminate internal documents from Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to revive long-debunked claims about the 2020 election. Stefanie Lambert was facing a bench warrant from a state court in Michigan, where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}