Lawsuit: Cybersecurity firm was instructed to lie about 2020 Pa. voting machine hacks

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that the XRVision lawsuit accuses attorney Stefanie Lambert of requesting a falsified report on voting machines from Fulton County, Pennsylvania.

A cybersecurity company claims in a lawsuit that an attorney for Fulton County, Pennsylvania, requested a falsified report on voting machines used in the 2020 election.

Through a civil suit filed this summer with federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan, XRVision accuses lawyer Stefanie Lambert, her law office and Pennsylvania resident Bill Bachenberg of defamation and breach of contract. Bachenberg is the founder of a successful tech startup who served as co-chair of a committee to reelect Donald Trump and later helped to establish the alternate slate of electors who attempted to cast Pennsylvania's electoral votes for Trump in December 2020.

The suit's allegations — coupled with information from a whistleblower who once worked for Bachenberg — lend to a mounting list of accusations and charges linking former President Donald Trump's allies with unauthorized voting machine inspections at the county level in multiple battleground states.

"Lambert and (her law office) requested that the Plaintiffs write a report stating that there were cheat codes in the software and that there was evidence of remote/local hacking of the elections systems," attorneys for XRVision write in their suit. "However, Plaintiffs refused to do this because it was not true."

Former Bachenberg employee Mike Ryan said he met with the FBI in April and again in September to share the information and documentation sourced in this article. He had worked for a Bachenberg-led nonprofit from January 2020 until this past November.

"The people have a right to know what happened with our nation's voting machines," Ryan told the USA TODAY Network.

Attempts to reach Lambert and Bachenberg for comments were unsuccessful.

Who is Stefanie Lambert?

When Trump publicly and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen via cheating and fraud, local and state officials in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Michigan acted to inspect or audit their voting machines. Lambert is a common denominator in all of these instances.

In Pennsylvania, she and Thomas Carroll — a Pottstown lawyer who was a top signatory on the alternate slate of electors with Bachenberg — became pro bono counsel for Fulton County commissioners on April 12, 2022.

They were formally appointed by 2-1 vote. Republican Commissioners Stuart Ulsh and Randy Bunch were in favor, with Democrat Paula Shives opposed.

Ulsh and Bunch have since been circumspect about Lambert.

During proceedings in late August to determine an escrow agent for voting machines inspected after the 2020 election, the county's legal counsel objected at least six times when lawyers for the Pennsylvania Department of State asked whether Lambert was still an attorney for the county. Ulsh begrudgingly confirmed it.

As reported this past summer by The Arizona Republic, Lambert was a key figure in the state's audit of the 2020 election.

Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, exchanged nearly 2,400 text messages with Lambert while conducting the Arizona Senate's review of Maricopa County voting machines. He's concealed more than 1,600 of these messages in spite of court orders to hand them over in response to a public records lawsuit from The Arizona Republic.

Logan invoked attorney-client privilege to try to shield the messages, even though Lambert was not his lawyer in this matter and had no official role in the Arizona audit.

Lambert has additional ties to voting machine breaches in Georgia, where Trump and 18 allies were indicted on 41 charges for attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The Detroit Free Press has reported that a FedEx shipment of forensics material from Georgia's Coffee County was addressed to Lambert and sent to a Michigan address associated with a private investigator named Michael Lynch.

Lambert has already been indicted in Michigan.

She faces multiple counts, including "undue possession" of a voting machine, for carrying out an unauthorized review of voting machines in three counties with the assistance of Cyber Ninjas' Logan and others. Former Michigan state Rep. Daire Rendon and former Michigan attorney general candidate Matt DePerno face similar charges in relation to the case.

All three have maintained their innocence, claiming the prosecutions are politically motivated. Lambert said via social media on Sept. 6 that journalists should be reporting on "malicious python script installed by Dominion in Fulton PA with international communications" instead.

"I will win each and every sham accusation made against me," she wrote.

The Python script statement is a reference to an unauthorized 2022 report on Fulton County voting machines by Michigan-based Speckin Forensics. Multiple attempts to interview Speckin about their findings have gone unanswered.

In another connection to the Trump White House, Lambert represented attorney Sidney Powell in a 2021 sanctions case in Michigan. Lambert argued that Powell's statements challenging the 2020 election results were "legally opinion."

By her own admission in a separate defamation suit, Powell said "no reasonable person" would believe her accusations about Dominion voting machines being rigged were "truly statements of fact."

As reported by numerous outlets, Powell was present for the widely reported Dec. 18, 2020, Oval Office meeting. She had urged Trump at that time to appoint her a special counsel and to seize voting machines across the country, according to Axios.

Who is Bill Bachenberg?

As the founder of cyber company DBSi, Bachenberg is a self-made millionaire and prominent Republican donor. The Allentown resident owns Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays and has served on the board of the National Rifle Association.

The XRVision suit alleges that Bachenberg agreed to fund attorney fees and expenses related to the Trump-fueled fraud investigations. Attorneys for the company added that Bachenberg gave Lambert a $1 million line of credit toward these efforts, and that he determined "which forensic experts to hire and which election controversies to pursue."

Prior to the review of Pennsylvania voting systems, Bachenberg paid XRVision nearly $200,000 through Lambert for inspections of voting machines from Michigan's Antrim County, an endeavor labeled "Project Sampson" that took place between May 2021 and December 2021.

Later, when XRVision reported that voting machines from Fulton County, Pennsylvania had not been hacked or pre-configured to favor any particular candidates despite being "highly insecure," the suit alleges that Bachenberg and Lambert became furious. Attorneys for the company say Bachenberg and Lambert still owe the company $550,000 for its work on the voting machine inspections.

XRVision is requesting an additional $10 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages, claiming that their reputation was slandered among members of the Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona senates and causing them to lose potential contracts.

John C. Burns, a Missouri-based attorney for XRVision, said the case hasn't proceeded yet because they've been unable to serve notice to Bachenberg and Lambert. He added that Lambert in particular has been difficult to reach, noting that her TransUnion report has associated her with several name variations: Stefanie Lambert Junttila, Stefanie Lynn Lambert, Stefanie Lambert Neagos and Stephanie L. Serafinski.

"I don't really have any comment except to say that the lawsuit speaks for itself," Burns said.

Because the Fulton County commissioners allowed unauthorized access to the voting machines at issue in the XRVision suit on numerous occasions, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer has ordered the machines to be transferred to a neutral third party. She ruled last month that Pro V&V, an Alabama company recommended by the Pennsylvania Department of State, is to take custody instead of the vendor preferred by the county commissioners and their legal team.

Bruce Siwy is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network's Pennsylvania state capital bureau. He can be reached at bsiwy@gannett.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @BruceSiwy.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: XRVision lawsuit: Voting machine fraud claim urged by Stefanie Lambert