Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
The co-founder of a pro-Trump student group that was forced to close over chronic campaign-finance non-compliance pretended to be a lawyer and defrauded clients out of tens of thousands of dollars, federal prosecutors say.
John Lambert was arrested this month on federal wire-fraud charges. According to the government, Lambert assumed the identity of a New York attorney named Eric Pope and duped clients into sending him large sums of money via PayPal to do legal work that he was neither qualified nor credentialed to perform.