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Pro-Trump lawyer Stefanie Lambert removed from Dominion case after leaking 2020 election documents
Pro-Trump lawyer Stefanie Lambert, who is facing felony charges in Michigan of improperly accessing voting equipment after the 2020 presidential election, has been disqualified from representing a prominent funder of election conspiracy theorists who is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems.
Corey Williams / AP
Lambert has been representing Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, in a defamation lawsuit brought against him by Dominion, one of the main targets of conspiracy theories over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Lambert was disqualified from the case on Tuesday after admitting she released thousands of confidential discovery documents that she had agreed to keep private.
Because of Lambert’s actions, the documents that all parties “had agreed to keep confidential, have now been shared widely in the public domain,” U.S. District Court Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya wrote in a 62-page opinion.
“Lambert’s repeated misconduct raises the serious concern that she became involved in this litigation for the sheer purpose of gaining access to and publicly sharing Dominion’s protected discovery,” wrote Upadhyaya.
Lambert’s lawyer, Daniel Hartman, said by phone Wednesday that Lambert plans to appeal the decision.
“We are appealing,” Byrne wrote in a text to The Associated Press. “They may think it was a tactical victory, but they will come to understand it was a strategic mistake.”
Lambert acknowledged earlier this year passing on records from Dominion Voting Systems to “law enforcement.” She then attached an affidavit that included some of the leaked emails and was signed by Dar Leaf — a county sheriff in southwestern Michigan who has investigated false claims of widespread election fraud from the 2020 election — to a filing in her own case in Michigan. The rest of the documents were posted to an account under Leaf’s name on the social platform X.
As a result, Dominion filed a motion demanding Lambert be removed from the Byrne case for violating a protective order that Upadhyaya had placed on documents in the case. It said Lambert’s disclosure had triggered a new round of threats toward the company, which has been at the center of elaborate conspiracy theories about Trump’s loss.
The request was described by Upadhyaya as “extraordinary” but necessary after Lambert has repeatedly shown she “has no regard for orders or her obligations as an attorney.”
In a separate case, Lambert has been charged in Michigan with four felonies for accessing voting machines in a search for evidence of a conspiracy theory against Trump. She was arrested by U.S. Marshals earlier this year after a Michigan judge issued a bench warrant for missing a hearing in her case.
Along with a local clerk in Michigan, Lambert has also been charged with multiple felonies, including unauthorized access to a computer and using a computer to commit a crime, after transmitting data from a local township’s poll book related to the 2020 election.
Lambert has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
She sued unsuccessfully to overturn Trump’s loss in Michigan.
Mr. Biden won Michigan by nearly 155,000 votes over then-President Trump, a result confirmed by a GOP-led state Senate investigation in 2021.
Dominion filed several defamation lawsuits against those who spread conspiracy theories blaming its election equipment for Trump’s loss. Fox News settled the most prominent of these cases for $787 million last year.
Dominion’s suit against Byrne is one of several the company has filed against prominent election deniers, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and attorney Sidney Powell.
The editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times has resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president, a journalism trade publication reported Wednesday.
Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview that she resigned because the Times was remaining silent on the contest in “dangerous times.”
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza said. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
In a post on the social media platform X that did not directly mention the resignation, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong said the board was asked to do a factual analysis of the policies of Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump during their time at the White House.
Additionally, “The board was asked to provide (its) understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years,” he wrote. “In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being president for the next four years.”
Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018, said the board “chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review that the board had intended to endorse Harris and she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial.
A LA Times spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
The LA Times Guild Unit Council & Bargaining Committee said it was “deeply concerned about our owner’s decision to block a planned endorsement in the presidential race.”
“We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to Editorial Board members for his decision not to endorse,” the guild said in a statement. “We are still pressing for answers from newsroom management on behalf of our members.”
Trump’s campaign jumped on Garza’s departure, saying the state’s largest newspaper had declined to endorse the Democratic ticket after backing Harris in her previous races for U.S. Senate and state attorney general.
Her exit comes about 10 months after then-Executive Editor Kevin Merida left the paper in what was called a “mutually agreed” upon departure. At the time, the news organization said it had fallen well short of its digital subscriber goals and needed a revenue boost to sustain the newsroom and its digital operations.
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The secretary of state’s office was the target of an unsuccessful cyberattack earlier this month, the agency confirmed to CBS News on Wednesday.
An official with the secretary of state’s office said the attack was an attempt to crash the absentee voting website, and it was discovered when the agency noticed a spike in attempts to access the site nine days ago, on Oct. 14. There were over 420,000 attempts made from around the world, which the official said was a coordinated attempt to make the website crash.
Security experts were ultimately able to thwart the attack. The secretary of state’s office said it still does not know who was behind the attack but suggested it may have been a foreign country.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the office, wrote Thursday evening in a social media post that “this was a big win for our cyber security team and our partners. We work everyday to protect Georgia voters and our systems.” In a separate post, he said, “The attack was detected and mitigated quickly.” CNN first reported the cyberattack attempt.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the cyberattack and worked with the Georgia secretary of state’s office in the aftermath of the incident, sources confirmed to CBS News. The FBI has not responded to a request for comment.
Georgia voters have also been showing up for early voting, which began on Oct. 15. Early voters shattered records this year for the presidential election, the secretary of state’s office said, more than doubling early voting figures from 2020 on the first day, with 310,000 ballots cast, compared with 136,739 on the first day of early voting in 2020.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger predicted there would be record turnout in Georgia this year, telling CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” Sunday, “You look at the turnout — we’re almost pushing 1.4 million who’ve already voted early or who we’ve accepted their absentee ballots.”
Nicole Sganga and
contributed to this report.
