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.
Lambert did so through a company called Headline Consulting, which he later rebranded as a supposed law firm under the moniker of Pope & Dunn. According to Law.com, which first reported the indictment, the latter’s website ripped off extensive content from the white-shoe law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP.
As he allegedly bilked money from clients, including one who was forced to partially liquidate his 401(k), Lambert was also helping to run Students for Trump, a campus-based advocacy group that promoted the president’s 2016 candidacy and continues to be active online and on social media.
Lambert co-founded Students for Trump with Ryan Fournier, who is listed, in his capacity as the head of Students for Trump, as the administrator of Headline Consulting’s website in public registration information. Fournier didn’t respond to questions about his association with the firm.
Though Students for Trump claimed to be organizing dozens of campus chapters nationwide, it never disclosed any information about its finances to the Federal Election Commission, despite at least nine letters from the FEC prompting it to do so. Two separate Students for Trump entities registered with the FEC were administratively terminated last year for failure to file periodic financial-disclosure reports.
Contrary to claims by some of the group’s more vocal defenders—even those who, apparently, consulted real lawyers—all committees registered with the FEC are required to file periodic financial-disclosure reports, even if they don’t spend or receive any money.
