Judge Reminds Kraken Lawyer That Getting Disqualified Really Does Mean You Have To Stop Filing Stuff
Bye, Felicia!
Kraken lawyer Stefanie Lambert continues to break new ground in the legal profession. Although not, perhaps, in the way she’d hoped.
The attorney for Overstock weirdo Patrick Byrne already managed to get herself arrested at the conclusion of a motions hearing in March. Lambert was there to represent the prodigious conspiracy theorist in a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. At the conclusion of the proceeding, Lambert was picked up on an outstanding warrant from Michigan, where she’s under multiple indictments for interfering with election equipment.
The March hearing pertained to an emergency motion filed by Dominion, which had just found its internal communications, turned over to Byrne in discovery pursuant to a protective order, posted online by a “constitutional sheriff” from rural Michigan named Dar Leaf, a prominent figure in election conspiracy theory circles. For five months, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya tried without success to constrain Lambert and her client, whose antics included engineering a friendly subpoena for protected Dominion discovery in an unrelated criminal case, tweeting a video of Dominion’s CEO arriving at a deposition, filing a false meet and confer statement, and promising on a Twitter livestream to “make this stuff public” because “fuck you to the judicial system.”
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To be fair, that last was Byrne himself, not Lambert.
On August 13, Judge Upadhyaya finally had enough and disqualified Lambert from the case.
“The bottom line is that, in her short time as counsel, Lambert has repeatedly shown that she has no regard for orders or her obligations as an attorney before this Court,” she wrote in a 62-page ruling exhaustively detailing Lambert and Byrne’s shenanigans. She also ordered the pair to file affidavits by August 20 explaining how, when, and to whom they’d disseminated Dominion’s internal communications.
Now, hold on to your hats, kids, but … that did not happen.
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What did happen was that Lambert filed a “Motion for an immediate abeyance and stay of all actions, conferences, and orders, or entry of orders, filing of affidavits, and/or enforcement or entry of any orders pending the filing and consideration of Dr. Byrne’s objection to the Magistrate’s Opinion.” She argued that her client had a right to file an objection within 14 days, and thus the court’s order was functionally a nullity until the objection had been filed and ruled upon.
“These actions and orders, if taken and entered, respectively, would be sufficiently egregious to result in a mistrial due to the fact that this Court would be ignoring the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and its own local rules in taking such actions or entering such other and further orders,” she wrote, requesting a stay of all proceedings until Judge Carl Nichols, the presiding judge, could rule on her motion.
Judge Nichols, who is probably thanking his lucky stars every day that he referred Byrne, along with Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, and Rudy Giuliani, to poor Judge Upadhyaya, did not take the bait.
“For the avoidance of doubt, it is ORDERED that the Motion to Stay be referred to Magistrate Judge Upadhyaya,” he said in a minute order on Wednesday.
This morning Judge Upadhyaya dropped the hammer. First she struck from the record a motion for extension of time to file the status report filed by Lambert after she’d been booted from the case, instructing the clerk to mail a copy of the minute order to Byrne directly. Then she denied the request to stay all deadlines.
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“There is no basis to stay all proceedings in the consolidated cases in light of the Court’s Order disqualifying Ms. Lambert from this case,” she went on. “In response to Defendant’s alleged claimed hardship regarding the disqualification of Ms. Lambert, the Court notes that, not only is Defendant entitled to proceed pro se, he himself has previously identified at least one other ‘highly qualified’ lawyer who is working with Defendant in this matter.”
The linked pleading is currently sealed, but this is presumably a reference to John Case, the attorney on the unrelated criminal matter involving Byrne’s ally Tina Peters, a former election clerk in Colorado. In response to Dominion’s protest that Lambert and Byrne had shared protected discovery with Peters’s counsel, Case submitted an affidavit stating that he was “assisting Stefanie Lambert in her defense of Patrick Byrne.” Which rather undercuts Lambert’s complaint that her disqualification “effectively puts Dr. Byrne to defend himself without representation of counsel of his choice and before he can retain any other counsel.”
Judge Upadhyaya did give Lambert and Byrne a little break though, allowing them to put off filing those affidavits until after Judge Nichols responds to their objection.
But considering how receptive he’s been thus far … they might want to get to work.
US Dominion Inc. v. Byrne [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
