Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File); Tina Peters (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File); Stefanie Lambert attends a rally for Republican candidates in 2022. (Todd McInturf/Detroit News via AP)
After a U.S. magistrate judge warned a “Kraken” lawyer and her ex-Overstock CEO client that leaking discovery from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit could lead to “potential sanctions for contempt of court,” the voting machine company claims to have uncovered evidence of “collusive” behavior between the defendant, his lawyer, and an attorney for an indicted former Colorado clerk.
While asking for permission to file a brief Tuesday in further support of monthslong efforts to disqualify attorney Stefanie Lambert from representing Patrick Byrne, Dominion claims to have identified “at least four apparent violations” of the “letter and spirit of the Court’s orders,” orders prohibiting the sharing of discovery with non-parties to the case.
Dominion began its campaign to kick Lambert off the case almost as soon as her representation of Byrne began in March.
Lambert, twice indicted in Michigan for 2020 election-related cases, has remained on the Dominion case for months even though the plaintiff has claimed she and her client would find new and “more creative” ways to leak discovery, similar to the way that they justified handing documents to Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf by claiming the documents contained “evidence of criminal violations” of “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.”
Most recently, Dominion said it was alarmed that there appeared to be a “highly-orchestrated scheme” to further “disseminate” discovery through the criminal case of indicted former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters (R), claiming that Lambert had been issued a subpoena in the case that could give her “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 Peters.
On Tuesday, Dominion unearthed what it described as “harmful,” “seemingly collusive efforts” between Lambert, Byrne, and Peters’ attorney John Case.
“Previously unknown to Dominion or this Court, a Colorado attorney named John Case, who is working with Ms. Lambert on Mr. Byrne’s defense in this case, has reviewed Dominion Discovery Material. Mr. Case is also currently defending Mesa County, CO clerk Tina Peters on criminal charges,” court documents said. “In a recent public filing in that criminal case, he purported to reference and incorrectly characterized Dominion Discovery Material. Mr. Case is the same attorney who subpoenaed the production of Dominion Discovery Material from Ms. Lambert […] Yet neither Mr. Byrne nor Ms. Lambert notified the Court of these facts, just as neither has done anything to stop Mr. Case.”
Dominion claimed that Case is the attorney who subpoenaed both Lambert and the company’s ex-general counsel, Mike Frontera, for documents in the Peters prosecution, and that Case’s Frontera subpoena was ultimately smacked down by the judge in the criminal case for irrelevancy.
But before that quashing, Case admitted he “reviewed” emails from discovery in Dominion’s lawsuit against Byrne and said he is “assisting Stefanie Lambert in her defense of Patrick Byrne,” the voting machine company said.
The following paragraph was included entirely in bold, to support the argument that Lambert should be disqualified from the case once and for all:
Despite the fact that Ms. Lambert clearly knows Mr. Case, clearly knows Mr. Case accessed Dominion documents, and clearly knows about the filing in which Mr. Case (inaccurately) purported to describe what the documents show, she never told this Court about any of this.
While Case allegedly claimed that the Dominion documents “corroborated” that the company’s machines “are capable of manipulating ballots and vote tabulations, which violates federal and state law,” Dominion said that was both a false assertion and not even relevant to Peters’ case, pointing to the language of the judge’s quashing of the Frontera subpoena.
“The issue herein seems to be a reoccurring theme: Defendant [Peters] wanting to make the case about the security of voting machines, purported collusion between Dominion and government authorities, and the like. This Court has yet to see an evidentiary basis for the admission of this type of evidence,” the judge ruled, according to Dominion’s filing. “And as I have said before, it appears the only basis for the admission of such evidence is not to show that Defendant didn’t do what she is charged with, but rather to make the focus of the trial something separate from what the jury will be charged with deciding. This makes the information sought irrelevant, misleading, and likely to confuse the issues.”
Tina Peters currently awaits a state trial in Colorado for allegedly tampering with election equipment, attempting to influence public servants, and engaging in official misconduct by allowing an unauthorized third party to make copies of voting machine hard drives, leading “confidential digital images” of county Dominion equipment and passwords to be “published on the internet.”
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