Ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne speaks during a panel discussion at the Nebraska Election Integrity Forum on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2022, in Omaha, Neb. (AP Photo/Rebecca S. Gratz); indicted ex-Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images); Stefanie Lambert attends a rally for Republican candidates in Michigan on Oct. 1, 2022. (Todd McInturf/Detroit News via AP)
It’s been months now since Dominion Voting Systems complained of a massive discovery leak and subsequently demanded the disqualification of an indicted “Kraken” lawyer from representing former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne in a 2020 election-related defamation suit. While a Washington, D.C., federal court has taken no action on Dominion’s pending motion to boot attorney Stefanie Lambert from the case, the voting technology company has identified a new threat to discovery materials: a subpoena issued to Lambert in the criminal case of indicted former Colorado clerk Tina Peters (R).
In a Friday motion to enforce an existing protective order in their lawsuit, Dominion’s lawyers claimed that there appears to be a “highly-orchestrated scheme” by Byrne and Lambert to “improperly release yet more discovery information” through Peters’ case, which was set for trial in late July after months of delays.
How we got here
Stefanie Lambert immediately caused alarm in March when she started representing Patrick Byrne. That month, Robert Driscoll, Byrne’s 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 an election-denying sheriff.
Those documents were then posted on the internet and formed the basis of Barry County Sheriff Dar 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 that 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)
Lambert herself faces felony indictments in her home state of Michigan, most recently a computer crime case accusing her and one of her clients, ousted Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott of Hillsdale County, of allowing an “unauthorized computer examiner access to voter data, including non-public voter information, concerning the 2020 General Election,” in service of promoting “baseless conspiracies” about the 2020 election outcome.
Before that, Lambert was charged in Oakland County for an alleged conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to and willfully damage voting machines.
In defense of their actions in the Dominion case, Lambert and Byrne have cited emails from discovery 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.”
Tina Peters, a former Mesa County clerk in Colorado who along with ally and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in 2022 was identified as a “subject” of a federal probe into potential identity theft, intentional damage to a protected computer, and conspiracy, is currently awaiting a state trial 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.”
Peters’ trial was expected to start in March, but an eleventh-hour attorney shake-up led the judge to push the proceedings back for months. Between then and now, Peters’ lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland over alleged government retaliation fell flat.
What Dominion is claiming now
Dominion Voting Systems freshly alleges that Byrne and Lambert are trying to use the Peters case to advance their ongoing 2020 election-denying mission and to help her defense.
As recently as July 1, Dominion claimed, Lambert sent an email saying that she had been served a subpoena for document production and testimony in Peters’ case.
While it is Dominion’s position that Lambert has to “object to the production of the Confidential or Attorneys’ Eyes Only Discovery Material,” citing court orders, Lambert has not done so, according to the filing.
Instead, Dominion theorizes that there has been a coordinated effort to expose discovery through Peters’ case, including by sharing deposition location info so that the company’s CEO John Poulos could be served a subpoena “supposedly issued by the Court overseeing Tina Peters’ case.”
“Rather, it has become clear that either Ms. Lambert, Mr. Byrne, or both, have been sharing information with Tina Peters’ legal team (and perhaps others) about the location of ongoing depositions in this case, including so that Dominion employees could be served with plainly improper subpoenas on their way into questioning,” Dominion further alleged, calling these tactics “intentional harassment.”
As for the Lambert subpoena in the Peters case? Dominion claims it is conveniently designed to permit “virtually unfettered” disclosure of documents:
The Lambert Subpoena strongly suggests this connection, too. Ms. Lambert is the only defense counsel across all the pending actions to be served with a subpoena in the Tina Peters case. And yet the information sought has nothing to do with Ms. Lambert or Mr. Byrne specifically, but rather Dominion. Moreover, the subpoena is drafted to allow Ms. Lambert (the putative target of the subpoena) 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 Tina Peters.”
Calling the subpoena part of a “highly-orchestrated scheme” to work around court orders and “launder[] Dominion’s documents to individuals who are not authorized to receive them,” the company is demanding the D.C. court put a stop to such legal maneuvering.
“The Court should order Ms. Lambert to comply with the Protective Order and Status Quo Order—including ordering her to object to the subpoena issued to her in the Tina Peters case and to refrain from producing any documents thereunder unless and until this Court confirms otherwise,” the filing concluded.
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