Main: President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One at Shannon Airport, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026, in Shannon, Ireland. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson). Left inset: U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols (U.S. District Court photo).
One day after a federal judge tore into an "abuse of the court system" and "frivolous" behavior on the part of Patrick Byrne and his counsel, the ex-Overstock CEO purported to put the "misguided" jurist "on notice" of potential criminal exposure.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Donald Trump appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., has been assigned for years to the case that began with Dominion Voting Systems as the plaintiff and now names Liberty Vote in the caption, following a sale to Republican former election official Scott Leiendecker's company.
Byrne, one of several figures who reportedly insisted behind the scenes at the White House in late 2020 and elsewhere that an international corporate cabal stole the election from Trump, was hit with the defamation suit the next year.
By 2024, a U.S. magistrate judge made the "rare" move to disqualify Byrne's indicted "Kraken" attorney Stefanie Lambert for "intentional, dangerous, and relentless misconduct." In that massive discovery breach, "username-and-password access" to the "entire repository" of Dominion discovery documents was handed to a 2020 election-denying sheriff, a non-party to the case.
In defense of their actions, Lambert and Byrne had said discovery included emails written in "Serbian and foreign languages" that they claimed were "evidence of criminal violations," namely, "top level Dominion employees directing and tasking foreign nationals to remotely access voting machines utilized in the United States during the November 3, 2020 election."
After the U.S. Supreme Court did nothing to salvage Lambert's representation of Byrne, Peter Ticktin, who is also a noted attorney for Jan. 6 plaintiffs, renewed efforts to lift the protective order in the Liberty Vote case.
On Tuesday, Nichols refused to set aside the protective order Byrne and his counsel "flagrantly violated […] throughout this litigation," denying the motion as "frivolous and an abuse of the court system."
The very next day, Ticktin filed documents calling his client a "federal whistleblower," and insisted Byrne cannot be gagged 30 days out from the 2026 midterm elections.
"The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of War announced their directives to pursue evidence of foreign interference of the federal election, and to secure the election," the filing said. "Every patriotic citizen, especially judges who have taken their oaths to protect the Constitution of the United States are required to provide any and all evidence they possess, and yet, the judges in the case at bar appear to be interfering with these investigations, notwithstanding that the undersigned is making it very clear that this Court is assisting in the hiding of evidence of this very crime."
Claiming Nichols' refusal to "see the basis to set aside the protective order" in his chambers was "nothing short of an apparent dereliction of duty," the attorney added that Byrne "cannot be silenced by this court when he needs to report evidence of crimes."
"Dr. Byrne enjoys protection under the Federal whistleblower laws due to his work for the intelligence community, and the only limitation on his reporting or Free Speech is limited to classified documents," court documents said, asserting that Nichols "must dissolve its own protective order now that it is aware of crimes."
Then came the kicker: Ticktin expressed that the "last thing" he "wants to see is a misguided judge go over a line from judgment to criminal activity."
"This Court is on notice," Byrne and his lawyer warned. "Orders that continue to silence, delay, disrupt, or interfere with criminal investigations and national security operations are nothing less than the commission of the crime of obstruction of justice, 18 U.S.C. § 1512, and Misprision of a Felony, 18 U.S.C. § 4."
That unsurprisingly caught the attention of Liberty Vote's attorneys and came up in a filing two days later.
"This is notable for many reasons, including because Mr. Byrne's misconduct is not winding down. It is escalating," they said. "In view of this escalation, Plaintiffs ask the Court to put their motion for default judgment back on the calendar, including by setting a date for Plaintiffs' reply and a hearing date as soon as practicable."