'Students For Trump' Fake Lawyer Receives Real Jail Sentence

FAFO

“Eric is a graduate of the New York University School of Law and following that 15 years of work experience with corporate and patent law,” read the profile of Eric Pope, principal at Pope & Dunn. “Through this background Eric has stretched across many states, countries and different fields of expertise. He is sought after for his experience with financial and corporate matters due to his ability to mitigate legal scenarios while keeping the growth of his clients business a focal point.”

And it was all true! Except that Eric Pope never went to NYU, had no experience with corporate or patent law, and did not exist.

Pope was an online alter-ego cooked up in 2016 by John Lambert who was then a 20-year-old college student in North Carolina. Using gig sites like Upwork, Lambert and his fellow “Students for Trump” co-founder Ryan Fournier marketed themselves as experienced attorneys, scamming more than two dozen would-be clients out of $46,000 using profiles cribbed from Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

And you showed up for CivPro at 8 a.m. like a chump!

Lambert, who is now 25, fails to have grasped the most basic tenet of criminal law: always be the guy who flips first. The New York Daily News confirms that Fournier is the unindicted co-conspirator from the 2019 complaint charging Lambert with multiple counts of wire fraud.

And so it was that Lambert was the only one in court yesterday facing down U.S. District Judge Valerie E. Caproni who was not impressed by his lawyer’s argument that his client’s “youthful exuberance” created a “non-reality-based perception of ‘practicing law,’ which was fueled by TV shows such as ‘Suits'” that “led him to believe that he could create a fake persona and act like a TV character, all with the goal of trying to learn the law and help others.”

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Describing him as “a cold-blooded fraudster who cared not a whit about the victims of his fraud,” Judge Caproni lambasted Lambert for leaving desperate would-be clients in the lurch.

“Mr. Lambert took his money and did nothing,” she said. “Mr. Lambert did not even have the common decency to make up an excuse and tell the victim to hire another attorney.”

Prosecutors asked for a custodial sentence of 15 to 21 months, citing the particular vulnerability of Lambert’s victims, “who likely sought a lawyer on a web-based platform because of their relative lack of sophistication regarding the legal field” and were “prevented them from obtaining real legal advice from a real lawyer.”

Lambert’s counsel asked for a non-custodial sentence, alluding to the “merciless” media coverage of a meme-troll who got famous posting pictures of women in bikinis to own the libs and then got arrested for fraud. (And they’re still at it.)

“The amount of attention that this case has generated has been a nightmare for John Tyler and for his family” Michigan attorney Gary Peters wrote in his sentencing memorandum.

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But Peters’s argument that Lambert was but a naive lamb corrupted by Fournier failed to carry the day.

“You cannot foist this off on being led astray by your co-defendant,” she said before sentencing him to 13 months in prison and ordering him to pay full restitution.

Stay in law school, kids!

Students for Trump founder John Lambert sentenced to 13 months for posing as lawyer [NY Daily News]
US v. John Lambert [Docket via Court Listner]


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.