Patrick Byrne, the Overstock.com weirdo who backed Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort in 2020, outcrazied a federal judge in California this week, narrowly escaping a default judgment in the defamation suit brought by Hunter Biden.
The litigation is a Mad Libs acid trip freakshow. The precipitating event was a rambling interview Byrne gave for the inaugural edition of something called Capitol Times Magazine in which he accused Joe and Hunter Biden of a bribery scheme involving Iranian nukes.
Five months later, Hunter Biden sued Byrne for defamation in the Central District of California. The complaint was part of a spate of litigation the former president’s son filed, including lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, a former Trump White House aide turned anti-Biden content creator, and the IRS. Most of those suits have dried up, but the case against Byrne persists — likely because, unlike his erstwhile pal Rudy, Byrne is still solvent.
The case proceeded in somewhat chaotic fashion. Byrne claimed to be hiding from Venezuelan assassins in Dubai and refused to return to the US to be deposed. But finally after multiple postponements and motions for sanctions, the day of trial arrived on Tuesday. Sixty jurors were assembled for voir dire. And then …
Judge Stephen Wilson has been on the bench since 1985. In Los Angeles. This man has seen some shit. And yet faced with the Byrne’s peculiar brand of chaos, he all but shorted out.
On Tuesday morning, Byrne was not in the courtroom, and neither was his lawyer, Michael Murphy. Instead, three other lawyers were at the table. Local counsel included Eric Neff, a former LA County prosecutor forced out after filing a bogus election fraud case, and Tom Yu, whose practice appears to consist entirely of defending cops in civil and criminal actions. The new lead attorney was one Stefanie Lambert, familiar to readers of this website as Byrne’s lawyer in the defamation case brought in DC by Dominion Voting Systems. In that case, she managed to get herself kicked out after repeatedly sharing protected discovery data — but not before getting herself arrested in the courtroom on an outstanding warrant from her home state of Michigan for tampering with voting machines. Lambert said that her motion for pro hac admission had been filed that morning, and cheerfully announced that she’d been managing the case from behind the scenes for months and was ready to proceed with the trial.
Unsurprisingly, the court had concerns. And so did the plaintiffs, who noted that Lambert was out on bond on two felony charges and had somehow forgotten to mention in her sworn declaration that her PHV application had been denied in the Middle District of Florida just six weeks earlier in yet another defamation suit against Byrne.
After a brief break, Judge Wilson denied Lambert’s PHV application, ordered her to remove herself from the counsel table, and told Neff he was in charge of the case. He also informed Neff that the lawyer is supposed to stand while addressing the court — something which appeared to be news to the lawyer.
But it was not meant to be! After another break, Neff and Yu returned to inform the court that they had both been fired.
“That must have happened in the last hour,” the judge gaped incredulously.
“It happened in the last ten minutes, Your Honor,” Yu conceded.
Which is just as well, really, since, as it turns out, Neff isn’t admitted to the bar of the Central District of California.
Plaintiff’s counsel promptly moved to hold the defendant in default, since he’d failed to appear for trial. And Judge Wilson told the parties he’d hold a show cause hearing on the motion for default at 9:30 the following morning.
That evening, Byrne filed a motion for reconsideration, demanding that the court reverse its decision to deny PHV admission to Lambert, decrying it as an abuse of discretion, and vowing to take an immediate appeal to the Ninth Circuit to vindicate his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. It described Lambert as an election law expert, “the premier specialized attorney in the County in this niche area of law.”
This language sounds strikingly like an objection Lambert filed to her disqualification from the Dominion case, in which she described herself as “the foremost leading expert advocate and attorney in the country, who has all the knowledge concerning Dominion’s voting machine systems, their flaws, and the collusion and involvement by foreign nationals and foreign elements directly in federal elections, is telling.” But here the document was signed by Florida lawyer Peter Ticktin, Donald Trump’s former boarding school roommate who served as local counsel in the Clinton RICO trollsuit that got the president $1 million in sanctions. His PHV application in the Byrne case was approved July 24, although he was not among the many attorneys in court on Tuesday.
In the event, Judge Wilson denied Biden’s request for a default judgment and postponed the trial yet again, this time to October 14. The defendant was ordered to appoint new counsel by August 15 and submit to further discovery on his finances. Lambert’s motion to reconsider her pro hac bid was rejected, and Ticktin’s admission was retroactively voided.
All in all, another big win for Team Bananapants Crazy.
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe to her Substack by clicking the logo:
The post Patrick Byrne And Hunter Biden Bring The Crazy To California Courtroom appeared first on Above the Law.
Patrick Byrne, the Overstock.com weirdo who backed Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort in 2020, outcrazied a federal judge in California this week, narrowly escaping a default judgment in the defamation suit brought by Hunter Biden.
The litigation is a Mad Libs acid trip freakshow. The precipitating event was a rambling interview Byrne gave for the inaugural edition of something called Capitol Times Magazine in which he accused Joe and Hunter Biden of a bribery scheme involving Iranian nukes.
Five months later, Hunter Biden sued Byrne for defamation in the Central District of California. The complaint was part of a spate of litigation the former president’s son filed, including lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, a former Trump White House aide turned anti-Biden content creator, and the IRS. Most of those suits have dried up, but the case against Byrne persists — likely because, unlike his erstwhile pal Rudy, Byrne is still solvent.
The case proceeded in somewhat chaotic fashion. Byrne claimed to be hiding from Venezuelan assassins in Dubai and refused to return to the US to be deposed. But finally after multiple postponements and motions for sanctions, the day of trial arrived on Tuesday. Sixty jurors were assembled for voir dire. And then …
Judge Stephen Wilson has been on the bench since 1985. In Los Angeles. This man has seen some shit. And yet faced with the Byrne’s peculiar brand of chaos, he all but shorted out.
On Tuesday morning, Byrne was not in the courtroom, and neither was his lawyer, Michael Murphy. Instead, three other lawyers were at the table. Local counsel included Eric Neff, a former LA County prosecutor forced out after filing a bogus election fraud case, and Tom Yu, whose practice appears to consist entirely of defending cops in civil and criminal actions. The new lead attorney was one Stefanie Lambert, familiar to readers of this website as Byrne’s lawyer in the defamation case brought in DC by Dominion Voting Systems. In that case, she managed to get herself kicked out after repeatedly sharing protected discovery data — but not before getting herself arrested in the courtroom on an outstanding warrant from her home state of Michigan for tampering with voting machines. Lambert said that her motion for pro hac admission had been filed that morning, and cheerfully announced that she’d been managing the case from behind the scenes for months and was ready to proceed with the trial.
Unsurprisingly, the court had concerns. And so did the plaintiffs, who noted that Lambert was out on bond on two felony charges and had somehow forgotten to mention in her sworn declaration that her PHV application had been denied in the Middle District of Florida just six weeks earlier in yet another defamation suit against Byrne.
After a brief break, Judge Wilson denied Lambert’s PHV application, ordered her to remove herself from the counsel table, and told Neff he was in charge of the case. He also informed Neff that the lawyer is supposed to stand while addressing the court — something which appeared to be news to the lawyer.
But it was not meant to be! After another break, Neff and Yu returned to inform the court that they had both been fired.
“That must have happened in the last hour,” the judge gaped incredulously.
“It happened in the last ten minutes, Your Honor,” Yu conceded.
Which is just as well, really, since, as it turns out, Neff isn’t admitted to the bar of the Central District of California.
Plaintiff’s counsel promptly moved to hold the defendant in default, since he’d failed to appear for trial. And Judge Wilson told the parties he’d hold a show cause hearing on the motion for default at 9:30 the following morning.
That evening, Byrne filed a motion for reconsideration, demanding that the court reverse its decision to deny PHV admission to Lambert, decrying it as an abuse of discretion, and vowing to take an immediate appeal to the Ninth Circuit to vindicate his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. It described Lambert as an election law expert, “the premier specialized attorney in the County in this niche area of law.”
This language sounds strikingly like an objection Lambert filed to her disqualification from the Dominion case, in which she described herself as “the foremost leading expert advocate and attorney in the country, who has all the knowledge concerning Dominion’s voting machine systems, their flaws, and the collusion and involvement by foreign nationals and foreign elements directly in federal elections, is telling.” But here the document was signed by Florida lawyer Peter Ticktin, Donald Trump’s former boarding school roommate who served as local counsel in the Clinton RICO trollsuit that got the president $1 million in sanctions. His PHV application in the Byrne case was approved July 24, although he was not among the many attorneys in court on Tuesday.
In the event, Judge Wilson denied Biden’s request for a default judgment and postponed the trial yet again, this time to October 14. The defendant was ordered to appoint new counsel by August 15 and submit to further discovery on his finances. Lambert’s motion to reconsider her pro hac bid was rejected, and Ticktin’s admission was retroactively voided.
All in all, another big win for Team Bananapants Crazy.
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe to her Substack by clicking the logo:
