BigLaw partner leaves firm after he sues voting machine companies for MyPillow CEO
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Barnes & Thornburg partner Alec Beck has left the law firm after filing a lawsuit on behalf of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell alleging that voting machine companies are “weaponizing the litigation process to silence political dissent.”
Barnes & Thornburg said in a statement Friday Beck filed the June 3 lawsuit without its authorization, report Law.com, Reuters, Law360 and Bloomberg Law.
The law firm said it is withdrawing as local counsel in the matter, and Beck is no longer with the firm.
Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of voting machines, filed a $1.3 billion defamation suit against Lindell in February for allegedly making false claims that the machines were used to rig the 2020 presidential election.
According to Lindell’s lawsuit, Smartmatic USA, another maker of voting machines, “has engaged in similar weaponization of the court system to attack other individuals and news outlets, merely for publicly sharing information they have gathered regarding vulnerabilities in, and attacks on, electronic voting machines in the 2020 general election.”
Lindell’s suit begins with a quote from the George Orwell novel 1984 that reads: “We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police, there is no other way.”
This quote from the same novel is also in the suit under a section labeled “Gaslighting: the Real Big Lie”: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
Lindell’s suit alleges abuse of process, defamation, RICO violations, civil rights violations and conspiracy.
Beck told Reuters that he left Barnes & Thornburg because of a “dispute,” and he plans to remain on the case.
Beck told Reuters that he joined Barnes & Thornburg in 2018; other coverage said he joined the firm in 2019. He previously worked at labor and employment boutique firm FordHarrison.
Barnes & Thornburg has removed Beck’s profile from its website. A cached version is here.
