Patrick Byrne (AP Photo/Jim Rassol), Stefanie Lambert during a July 2021 interview (Gateway Pundit/screengrab)
After a U.S. magistrate judge warned that a disqualification hearing would not be moved again, a “Kraken” lawyer facing multiple felony charges in Michigan showed up to court last Thursday in Washington, D.C., and made her best pitch for remaining on Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit after a massive discovery breach. Just hours later, Stefanie Lambert’s client, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, “appears” to have “once again violated” the protective order, a Dominion lawyer has since informed the judge.
Dominion attorney Davida Brook told U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya on Monday that Byrne, who was ordered to appear in person for last week’s hearing and was pressed along with his lawyer on whether he understood the protective order, apparently “used X to further disseminate the impermissibly leaked documents” from Dominion discovery that led to the plaintiff’s motion to disqualify Lambert from the case.
“On May 16, 2024, the same day as this Court’s most recent hearing on Dominion’s Emergency Motion, third party Patrick Colbeck, through the X.com account @pjcolbeck, published a string of posts promoting false claims about the Dominion documents Mr. Byrne and Ms. Lambert leaked, and attaching screenshots of what appear to be certain impermissibly leaked documents,” the Dominion filing said. “A few hours later, at 1:45 AM ET on May 17, Defendant Byrne, through his account @PatrickByrne, used X’s ‘quote’ function to repost one of Mr. Colbeck’s posts to Mr. Byrne’s hundreds of thousands of followers.”
Byrne’s “repost” of leaked discovery material also included some of his commentary on the disqualification hearing.
May 17 Patrick Byrne post on X that Dominion cited in a court filing.
“Yes, it does seem like they made many important concessions today,” Byrne wrote. “Methinks their lawyers are more familiar with civil practice than criminal law.”
Dominion said it “wanted to promptly bring this” issue to Upadhyaya’s “attention.”
As Law&Crime has reported, Stefanie Lambert immediately caused alarm in March when she started representing Byrne, as his lawyer at the time notified Dominion of a significant discovery breach, in which access to the “entire repository” of Dominion discovery documents was handed to Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf.
Those documents were then posted on the internet and were central to Leaf’s March 17 letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, discussing a criminal probe of Dominion employees — a continuation of never successful “Kraken” efforts to prove that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Leaf said — via an X account created in March 2024 — that he was investigating “conspiracy crimes, wire services fraud, honest services fraud, and perjury charges,” connected to Dominion CEO John Poulos’ “sworn testimony before the Michigan Legislature that its voting systems could not be accessed or connected to by outside networks and sources, and that it was a ‘US based company.””
Dar Leaf (Fox 17/screengrab)
Dominion, for its part, filed an emergency motion to disqualify Lambert from representing Byrne in the case.
In defense of their actions, Lambert and Byrne had said discovery included emails written in “Serbian and foreign languages” that they claimed were “evidence of criminal violations,” namely, “top level Dominion employees directing and tasking foreign nationals to remotely access voting machines utilized in the United States during the November 3, 2020 election.”
Dominion responded by dismissing the “xenophobic conclusion is that any email from non-US-based Dominion personnel is conclusive evidence of criminal activity.”
X post Patrick Byrne reposted on May 17.
The content Byrne reposted last Friday repeated the claim that “Dominion employs Serbian developers not subject to thorough background checks” and tagged Sheriff Leaf, Lambert, Byrne, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, among others.
Read Dominion’s letter to the magistrate judge here.
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