Fake att’y Don club chief gets pen ‘Fraudster’ fanboy
He was a Student For Trump, but definitely not a lawyer.
A judge slammed the founder of Students for Trump as a “cold-blooded fraudster” before sentencing him to 13 months in prison for posing as a lawyer.
John Lambert, 25, pretended to be Eric Pope of the Manhattan-based firm Pope & Dunn. He falsely claimed to be a graduate of NYU Law School with a finance degree from the University of Pennsylvania and 15 years of experience in corporate and patent law.
The baby-faced scammer from Tennessee admitted to running the racket from 2016 to 2018, which targeted people who had little or no experience seeking legal advice. Victims sought Lambert’s help through the freelancing website Upwork. He earned at least $46,654 through the legal advice he was totally unqualified to give.
Federal Judge Valerie Caproni called Lambert “a cold-blooded fraudster who cared not a whit about the victims of his fraud.”
She noted that one victim had expected Lambert — posing as a lawyer — to help with a credit problem.
“Mr. Lambert took his money and did nothing,” Caproni said. “Mr. Lambert did not even have the common decency to make up an excuse and tell the victim to hire another attorney.”
That victim, whose name was redacted from public court filings, wrote that Lambert rarely responded unless there was a problem with processing payments. The victim wrote that Lambert became outraged when questioned about his legal “work.”
“[Lambert] told me that I was insane for ever questioning him and that I should be ashamed of myself for questioning his integrity. He berated me on the phone and told me that I was irrational for ever questioning such an esteemed attorney from New York and started demanding that I send him a huge amount of money or that he would not do anymore work for me. In truth he had never done one bit of work for me,” the victim wrote.
Lambert grabbed headlines during the 2016 presidential campaign for the group he founded with classmate Ryan Fournier at Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., in 2015. Their Students for Trump group ran a Twitter account featuring photos of bikini-clad women and pictures of themselves at political events.
“We’ve been told that we’re more organized than the actual Trump campaign,” Lambert told The Chronicle of Higher Education before the election. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Schrier said the investigation began through a separate probe of a Miami-based cryptocurrency firm, Centra Tech, accused of scamming investors. Prosecutors came across emails from a lawyer, Eric Pope, who they realized didn’t exist. That led them to Lambert.
Defense attorney Gary Peters said he was disappointed with the sentence. He added that Lambert stopped supporting Trump due to the chaos in the early days of his administration.
“I lost focus on who I was. My ignorance was a disrespect to the law and my country,” Lambert said in Manhattan Federal Court. “My life will be forever marked by this poor choice at a young age.”
But Caproni was struck by Lambert’s failure to begin paying back his victims. He began college in 2015, took a break and is now a full-time student.
Lambert’s co-conspirator in the fraud was Fournier, the Students for Trump co-founder, Peters said. Fournier cooperated with prosecutors, the hearing revealed.
Peters said Lambert naively hoped to get early experience in the legal world by posing as a lawyer. Lambert was inspired by the legal drama “Suits,” where paralegals get away with pretending to be lawyers, Peters said.
But Caproni wasn’t buying it. “You cannot foist this off on being led astray by your co-defendant,” the judge said.
She noted that Lambert made numerous media appearances and founded the group that became a presence on campuses nationwide.
“Those are actions of a leader, not a follower,” Caproni said.