… compromised.Absolutely brilliant move from Patrick Byrne. Well done. Imagine that a party to a lawsuit can just email the judge and get what they want almost instantly? If you are Dominion you don’t have to imagine - that is your reality. Why are these judges so corrupt? Many are… https://t.co/wuSz7BRYG1
— Lara Logan (@laralogan) September 29, 2026
Patrick Byrne
Dominion Wrote to Our Judge Ex Parte and Got Relief in 2 Hours; the Next Day I Tried the Same Thing
Dear Judge Nichols,
I was impressed by the email from Dominion’s lawyer directly to you and impressed by the alacrity with which you acted upon it. Untutored in the august ways of the law as I am, I was not previously aware that a party can just email requests directly to a federal judge and get such prompt action, but I am doing so now. Obviously it is too much to expect that you will provide me with the same impressive customer service as you provide Dominion, but hope springs eternal. I have three issues for your consideration.
First, I would like to alert you that a Mob lawyer for both Venezuela and Nicholas Maduro has infiltrated your ranks. The USDOJ charged Nicolás Maduro with narco-terrorism conspiracy in an indictment unsealed in March 2020 (a superseding indictment unsealed in January 2026 expanded those charges). The DOJ alleged that he led the Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”)—a network of high-ranking Venezuelan military and government officials—and partnered with designated terrorist groups such as FARC over more than two decades. DOJ described this as a “narco-terrorism partnership” in which Venezuelan institutions were corrupted to protect trafficking. The State Department has listed him as a member of the FTO-designated Cartel de los Soles. The Treasury Department separately designated the Cartel de los Soles as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" in 2025, describing it as headed by Maduro and other senior regime figures that provided support to groups such as Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel. More broadly, DOJ and Treasury materials describe Maduro and his regime as having systematically corrupted state institutions (military, intelligence, legislature, judiciary) creating a “narco-state” in the language of the Treasury.
This Mafia has a lawyer, whom I assume I can safely refer to as a “Mob lawyer”. The name of that Mob Lawyer is “Magistrate Judge Maxila A. Upadhyaya”. Between 2019 and 2022 this Mob lawyer represented the narco-terrorists (per DOJ, State, and Treasury) Nicholas Maduro and Cartel de los Soles (a.k.a. “the Venezuelan government”). She did so while working at the DC offices of Venable, a law firm whose West Coast offices are managed by Mr. Kamala Harris (a.k.a. “Douglas Emhoff). Somehow Mob Lawyer Upadhyaya slipped through the cracks of your tight management of impartial justice and became (I-shit-thee-not) the magistrate judge over my case. There, and notwithstanding the fact that this case lies at the center of an issue that has brought the US to the edge of civil war, and that the eyes of the world are on this subject (riots have broken out in countries such as South Korea and Japan over election mischief, and government officials there have reached out for my assistance), Mob lawyer Upadhyay has issued remarkable rulings on behalf of her Venezuelan Mafia clients in an attempt to cover things up.
For example, as you are likely aware, there has been ample discovery demonstrating that the computer pads upon which Americans vote actually are shipped through Shanghai, where Chinese coders are tasked by Serbia development managers to rewrite the pads’ BIOS (the “firmware” that stands between hardware and software and controls basic machine operations). I am sure that a judge such as yourself who has had so much contact with the NSA does not need explained to him hat no further representations regarding the operations of these machines can then be trusted. There has been discovery demonstrating that these machines have been constructed and tested to allow VPN connectivity from abroad, and to run “virtual machines” internally (which can access and alter information in county systems while leaving essentially no trace). Discovery has also revealed that Dominion’s machines still make use of Sequoia’s WinEDS (née “Smartmatic SAES” from Venezuela) that runs as a separate server within the county servers (or more recently, perhaps on those virtual machines created from abroad within county election servers during our elections). There is discovery documenting that on the morning of Election Day November 3, 2020, Serbian engineers were corresponding with Dominion headquarters about VPNs, virtual machines, and uploading “cartridges of ballot images” into the WinEDS component of Dominion’s system in Chicago. This should all seem odd, as Dominion employees have given sworn testimony that their software is written in America by citizens who have clearances to do so, China has no touch-points, and (in Georgia, 2022) testified that after systems leave their Dominion warehouse in Texas, Dominion has no access to the county election systems and even if they did there exist no mechanisms by which they could alter elections.
Mob Lawyer/Magistrate Judge Upadhyaya has insisted that all such discovery be squelched per an NDA between Dominion and myself. One wonders if we had opened the discovery materials and found a dozen severed heads, a barrel of ricin, and a nuclear bomb, whether she would have mandated similar restraint. And oddly, when we followed her procedures and applied for removal of the NDA to disclose some explosive materials, Mob Lawyer Upadhyay sat on our application for approximately 3 years.
There is no reason for this Court to be aware, but the “Dr.” in “Doctor Byrne” refers to a doctorate in philosophy I earned from Stanford. Along the way I found myself teaching Martin Luther King’s incomparable, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in juxtaposition to the SCOTUS decision penned by Justice Potter Stewart confirming King’s conviction. While admittedly it always seemed unfair to let students directly compare the writing of Dr. King with that of an intellectual doofus like Potter Stewart, I tried to get students to see past the rhetoric to understand King’s argument itself: we have a moral duty to fight interconnected injustices; oppressed people cannot wait indefinitely for justice; there is a distinction between just and unjust laws; and that individuals have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws that degrade "the human personality."
These issues of injustice, timeliness, and degrading of “the human personality” are all present in this present case. Since Athens our civilization has observed a tradition that holds the consent of the governed is paramount (while differing on accounts of how that consent is to be derived, and even, who counts as “the governed”). Elections are how our citizens manifest this consent. The global uncertainty about the integrity of the elections which are seating various governments makes this an issue of the greatest import. Corruption in the technology underlying elections degrades the principle of “consent of the governed.” Dramatic corruption can distort that until it snaps, and we arrive at a tyrannical saddle-point where consent of the governed is not even an objective, allowing a form of oppression to solidify that would take us back centuries and do a lot more than “degrade” human personality. Thus for a Mobbed-up lawyer like Moxila Upadhyaya to arrive on the scene and issue me instructions about what I can talk about and what I can’t (even when those items are in the public domain), offends the sense of justice of any sane man, while the import of the issue (returning humanity to a state of oppression from which it cannot vote itself out) and its timeliness (every rigged election ratchets us one step closer to tyranny) mean that a judicial order to hush this up offends the sensibility of any moral person. Coming from a Mafia stooge like Upadhyaya, it demands too much.
Second, therefore, I write to inform you I respectfully decline to acknowledge or abide by instructions from Mob Lawyer Uppadhyaya. If you wish me to bury these materials of Dominion’s, I am going to have to see your signature on the order. Which would be funny. It would be really funny. An American-born federal judge agreeing that I cannot discuss materials that are already in the public, and cannot explain their relevance to an electorate of whom 80% no longer trust our election systems, or to parliaments concerned that they are being overthrown in silent soft-coups, would be a hoot. As would a remedy that says this case gets decided be default, with no airing in a public court. I am sure that would go down in the annals of American jurisprudence. Third, I wish to inform you that I understand and sympathize with plaintiff’s dilemma. In the words of three DHS Seniors with whom I spent three days in early 2024 meeting Venezuela whistleblowers and walking through their records, “This is the biggest crime since the Civil War… and maybe since Caesar was stabbed.” I would not want to be in Dominion’s shoes either. I would want my perfidy to be shielded from any public trial as well (I am not sure I would go so far as to demand to win a $1.6 billion claim on default judgement, but I'll give them an "A" fort originality). Your Honor, I’m a reasonable man. I want to accommodate Dominion. I’ll offer them a graceful exit. Through their lies they bluffed Fox News out of $787.5 million. Just instruct them to give me that, and I’ll walk away. Given the alternatives, even that Mob Lawyer Upadhyaya whom you appointed to magistrate this case might see this as a reasonable. That way, we can all part as friends.
While I do not expect the same two-hour turn-around you gave Dominion’s request (obviously they have some Preferred Customer status that gets them “concierge treatment"), a timely answer would be appreciated.
Most respectfully,
Patrick M. Byrne, PhD