John Lambert, a 23-year-old Tennessee man, has been charged by prosecutors with pretending to be a Manhattan attorney and grifting thousands of dollars from his would-be clients.
Oh, and by the way: he was also the co-founder of Students for Trump.
That nationwide group “mobilized college campuses in the run-up to the 2016 election and plans to do so again in 2020,” reports The Outline:
John Lambert, 23, was arrested last week and charged by Southern District of New York prosecutors with wire fraud for having invented a lawyer persona named “Eric Pope” that he used to solicit legal work online. ALM reported last week that the fake firm website he created appeared to have attorney biographies cribbed from senior partners at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Since his arrest, more details about Lambert’s background have emerged. Before he allegedly posed as a lawyer, Lambert was in college when he co-founded Students for Trump. As the group’s vice chairman, he appeared on NBC and Fox News and shared a stage with the hard-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed that a photo of Lambert depicted the man who was charged.
ALM was alerted to Lambert’s political background by people who knew of him when he was enrolled at Campbell University in North Carolina. It was at this school where he co-founded Students for Trump in late 2015, according to a profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education. A university representative said he was last enrolled in fall 2016.
[PHOTO: John Lambert, co-founder of Students for Trump. Screenshot of rally video via Outline.
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