Mike Lindell and the other voting machine conspiracy theorists are still at it

Nearly four years later, zealous supporters of former President Donald Trump who promoted the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged its machines to rob him of the 2020 election are still at it.

Even though Dominion has aggressively defended itself in court, a network of pro-Trump activists has continued to push false claims against the company, often by seeking to use information gleaned from the very defamation lawsuits the firm has filed against them.

The network includes wealthy business executives such as Patrick Byrne, who once ran Overstock.com, and Mike Lindell, the founder of Minnesota bedding company MyPillow. Both have sought without credible evidence to put Dominion at the heart of a vast conspiracy to deny Trump a victory.

It also includes a pro-Trump sheriff from southwest Michigan, a former election official from Colorado and Byrne’s own lawyer, who is facing charges of tampering with Dominion machines and who once worked alongside Trump’s legal team in claiming that the company was part of a plot to subvert the last election.

Some of their hands were evident in a recent confrontation, the company’s lawyers say.

Late last month, John Poulos, Dominion’s CEO, showed up for a private deposition in a lawsuit the company is pursuing against Byrne. He was unexpectedly met by a process server who slapped him with a subpoena to give evidence in a separate case involving Dominion.

The subpoena demanded that he turn over internal company documents for use at the trial of Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, some of whose legal bills have been paid by Byrne. Later this month, Peters will go in front of a jury in Grand Junction, Colorado, to face charges of tampering with Dominion machines in an effort to show that they were used against Trump.

Dominion won a widely publicized $787.5 million settlement from Fox News last year after the network repeatedly promoted lies that the company’s machines had been used to flip votes away from Trump to try to help Joe Biden win the White House.

The settlement, one of the largest ever in a defamation case, averted a trial that would have resulted in embarrassing evidence being aired about Fox’s role in amplifying falsehoods about Dominion.

The voting machine company has continued to press similar defamation suits against pro-Trump lawyers including Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, and men including Byrne and Lindell.

Some of those suits — especially Byrne’s, which is unfolding in U.S. District Court in Washington — have been turned back against Dominion, lawyers for the company say. Dominion lawyers claim that Stefanie Lambert, the lawyer defending Byrne, has repeatedly sought to use protected discovery information she obtained in the case — information she was not supposed to disclose elsewhere — to advance new conspiracy theories about the company.

“It has been nearly four years,” one of Dominion’s lawyers said at a hearing in March. “When does it stop?”

On the evening of March 17, for instance, Dar Leaf, the pro-Trump sheriff of Barry County, Michigan, who has often raised false claims about the 2020 election, posted on social media a letter to one of Trump’s biggest congressional allies, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, asking him look into allegations that Dominion had broken the law.

Along with the letter, Leaf posted a Google Drive with thousands of pages of internal Dominion documents that had been provided as discovery in Byrne’s lawsuit. Some showed that top officials at Dominion had communicated with employees in one of its back offices in Belgrade, Serbia, near the time of the election — an otherwise innocuous fact that, according to Leaf, indicated that “Serbian military criminals” were “running our elections.”

The following morning, court papers say, Lambert revealed that she had provided the documents to Leaf, couching the leak as giving “evidence to law enforcement.”

“The discovery (file from Dominion) contained evidence of numerous crimes,” she wrote on the social platform X. “The Constitution does not permit secret Serbians to run our elections.”

Lambert and Leaf have a history of denying Trump’s loss in 2020, and both were closely scrutinized by local prosecutors in Michigan on suspicion of taking part in a conspiracy to unlawfully obtain access to Dominion machines. Lambert was ultimately charged with several felonies as part of that investigation, but prosecutors have not charged Leaf.

Lambert was also one of eight lawyers who worked closely with Powell in filing a series of lawsuits — informally known as the “Krakens” — that sought to reverse Trump’s defeat by claiming that Dominion machines had been hacked in a plot to rig the vote count.

None of those suits succeeded and were found to be so baseless that a federal judge in Michigan ordered sanctions to be levied against Powell, Lambert and the others, saying they had committed “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”

Dominion has said in court papers that the revelation that the company has an office in Serbia is neither “new nor shocking.” Yet Leaf’s posts about the firm’s ties to the country went viral and led within days to threats against Dominion employees both at home and abroad, the company’s lawyers say.

Lambert has responded that she had every right to release the documents, even though they were under a protective order, because “the future of the country is at stake” and “elections are not secure.”

Byrne asserted in a post on X that the discovery materials contained “evidence of ongoing crime.”

“If she found a severed head in a discovery box,” he wrote, “she had a duty to report it to law-enforcement, too.”

In the wake of all of this, Dominion’s lawyers asked Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya, who has been working on the defamation suit, to kick Lambert off the case.

“If she’s not removed from the case,” one of the lawyers asserted at a hearing about Lambert in May, “all that will have happened is they will have gotten smarter about how to do this leak in the future.”

A little more one month later, Poulos was subpoenaed in the trial of Peters, the former Colorado election clerk.

Lawyers for Dominion say that Lambert received a similar subpoena and accused her of planning to use it as a way to get around the protective order in Washington and make the company’s proprietary documents public during the trial in Colorado. Indeed, Lambert formally asked the magistrate judge in Washington on Friday to lift the protective order so that she and Byrne could offer evidence at Peters’ trial.

Just days before that request was made, Dominion filed court papers revealing an additional twist: It had just discovered that John Case, the lawyer who had issued both subpoenas, was not only representing Peters but was also assisting Lambert in representing Byrne.

Moreover, the lawyers had learned that Judge Matthew Barrett, who is presiding over the trial in Colorado, had recently scolded Case and Peters for seeking to turn the proceeding into an attack against Dominion.

“The issue herein seems to be a reoccurring theme: Defendant wanting to make the case about the security of voting machines, purported collusion between Dominion and government authorities, and the like,” Barrett wrote. “This court has yet to see an evidentiary basis for the admission of this type of evidence.”

As if all of that was not enough, Lambert wrote an email July 12 to Dominion’s lawyers, saying she had received another request for the discovery material in Byrne’s case. A Michigan state lawmaker, she wrote, had asked her for a transcript of Poulos’ deposition.

The lawyers, writing back, immediately objected to the request and reminded Lambert that the deposition was under a protective order.

“I believe there is some confusion,” she responded. “This is not a person requesting the transcript in his individual capacity. This is a request by the government.”

To make her case, Lambert sent the lawyers the email she had gotten from the lawmaker, James DeSana. In it, DeSana explained why he had wanted the transcript in the first place.

It turned out that he and two of his Republican colleagues in the statehouse sought in April to bring charges against Poulos for lying about Dominion’s role in the 2020 election. He believed that the “deposition would likely yield additional evidence relating to our complaint.”