On July 14, a Texas jury found Chuck Johnson liable for $71 million in damages to conservative businessman Hal Lambert in a civil RICO and defamation case. The Independent described the case as a victory against a “notorious far-right troll.”
While that label was accurate a decade ago, Johnson is now an anti-Trump Democrat. After being fired or leaving on bad terms with the Daily Caller and Breitbart, he started his own publication, GotNews, and worked with open neo-Nazis and denied the Holocaust. GotNews shut down after being sued for libel in 2018.
Embittered, he spent the last five years smearing conservatives who made the mistake of associating with him. For example, he leaked his text messages with JD Vance to the Washington Post to harm Vance by association.
However, his antisemitism remained constant. He endorsed Harris for president in part because he thought Tim Walz was “breaking down the … myth of the Holocaust,” and he remains close with Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.
Johnson was an informant to FBI Counterintelligence agent Jonathan Buma before he was removed from the program in 2021. The left has lionized Buma for continuing the Russiagate claims against Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Elon Musk with Johnson’s assistance. Claiming to work with the government, Johnson celebrated Douglass Mackey’s arrest for posting anti-Hillary memes and went after Mike Benz and the “Claremont Jews” in Substack rants.
Lambert’s victory is not a blow against the “far-right,” but against a doxxer and wannabe Deep State operative.
According to Lambert’s lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of Texas, Johnson claimed to be working on behalf of the government to encourage people to invest with him. He threatened government reprisals when they didn’t.
On June 23, Federal Judge Mark Pittman found Johnson liable to Lambert and his company Point Bridge by default, for a “fraud and extortion scheme” where he presented himself as an “intelligence agent[] or asset[] of U.S. government agencies.”
Lambert is well-known in Republican donor circles, having served as Ted Cruz’s finance chair and founding the MAGA ETF. Johnson had twice sued Lambert, and both claims were dismissed.
After Johnson’s second lawsuit was thrown out, Lambert sued him last fall. The suit accused Johnson, along with partner Gator Greenwill, of using his fabricated ties to intelligence agencies to extort private companies into doing business with him.
For example, it alleged they “told Lambert about their government connections and said that Greenwill was associated with the CIA and could help Point Bridge and Mr. Lambert secure government contracts and funding for companies in which they invested.” Conversely, they “communicated that they could use their influence to interfere and stymie such companies’ chances of securing government contracts and funding.”
When Lambert and Umbra Space refused to give Johnson $100 million in stock, he said he was “with the Defense Department” and that he would destroy the company by cutting off its supply of government contracts.
The complaint rattles off a long list of other strange lies told by Johnson, including accusing Lambert of being a Russian and Israeli asset, accusing Lambert of being “maybe a front for the cartels,” and claiming “CIA connections” had ordered him to sue Lambert.
Throughout the litigation, Johnson tested how far a civil defendant could go without a judge throwing him in jail from sheer frustration.
In both the Point Bridge case and a separate lawsuit still unfolding in the Southern District of New York over the facial-recognition start-up Clearview, Johnson has made extraordinary steps to avoid discovery.
In the SDNY suit, he took the novel approach of telling Judge Katherine Polk Failla that he couldn’t comply with a discovery order because two Department of Homeland Security agents had ordered him not to. She contacted DHS to confirm that the agents Johnson claimed to be obeying did not even exist.
In Texas, Johnson attempted to escape the court’s jurisdiction by swearing an affidavit that he had never lived in Texas during the relevant period, despite having voted in Texas, made campaign donations from a Texas address, and even filed and lost a lawsuit in Texas, whose losing appeal revolved around his Texas residency.
He also tried to evade the case by arguing that he was unable to travel because of Fuchs’ disease, a form of progressive vision loss, while posting a travelogue including a driving selfie on his Substack.
Finally, Johnson promised to turn over his phone messages, but never did. On May 8, Johnson’s lawyer quit due to non-payment. At the same hearing, Johnson was ordered to comply with a set of discovery requests for documents, tweets, direct messages, and other similar materials. Judge Pittman set a May 29 deadline, which Johnson ignored. Instead, he posted on Substack that his defiance was deliberate: “It’s an honor to pay sanctions for expressing my viewpoint.”
On June 5, Judge Pittman warned Johnson that he was receiving his “last warning” and he must “either comply with the Court’s orders or you will be held in contempt.” Pittman gave him a week to surrender his devices to a third-party vendor to search for relevant discovery. The night of the deadline, he posted a rambling blog post on how Stephen Miller is “Bibi’s guy in the White House,” but he did not turn over his devices.
On June 18, Judge Pittman asked Johnson if he had complied with the discovery requests. Johnson once again said he had not, this time offering the excuse that he could not afford the costs of compliance. Pittman scolded Johnson, “You are becoming a drain on resources. You are a drain to the county, to the government, to this court.”
Judge Pittman finally had enough and granted Lambert a default judgment, meaning Johnson lost the lawsuit for failing to obey court orders, without Lambert needing to prove his case.
“It became evident to the Court that not only did its threat to place Johnson in the custody of the Marshal not affect Johnson, but he wished the Court [would] arrest him so that he could portray it as further evidence of his self-proclaimed martyrdom,” Pittman’s order states, citing Johnson’s musings that going to jail for contempt might be his first step toward one day becoming president.
Throughout the case, Johnson repeatedly insisted that Elon Musk was funding the lawsuit. Johnson’s primary evidence: Lambert’s attorney initially worked for the law firm Quinn Emmanuel and moved to DLA Piper, which both represented Musk or his companies.
On July 14, Johnson appeared in court wearing a wrinkled suit and a tattered tie. He stated, under oath, that he was not a wealthy individual and did not have “tens of millions of dollars.” When Lambert’s attorney asked about emails in which Johnson claimed to be worth that much, Johnson claimed that Elon Musk had hacked his email.
I attended the trial. During the lunch break, Johnson asked if he could write a message in my notebook, and wrote “I am going to win, but not the game you think I am playing.”
While some jurisdictions allow pro se litigants to narrate their testimony, the court required Johnson to ask questions to himself. Johnson made this cumbersome requirement farcical by cross-examining himself in the third person.
“Mr. Johnson, is it true you were possibly directed to go after the media apparatus formerly known as Gawker Media?” and responded, “Why yes, Mr. Johnson, that is true.”
During closing arguments, Johnson stated that he needed money to “buy his ex-wife back” and ranted on for minutes about his divorce. He added that he had a new girlfriend who “may or may not work for the government.”
After half an hour of deliberation, the jury awarded Lambert and Point Bridge Capital $15.5 million for civil RICO, which is trebled to $46.5 million; $9.5 million for defamation; and $15 million in punitive damages, totaling $71 million. Johnson will also be responsible for Lambert’s attorney’s fees.
The $71 million judgment is just the start of Johnson’s troubles. On July 2, Johnson was found liable for judgment in New York for Breach of Contract in the Clearview case.
Both judges have noted Johnson lied to the court about his government contacts. Judge Pittman stated at a hearing, “until Mr. Johnson is brought up on federal, state, or criminal charges one day, this behavior by him will never end.”
While a default judgment, he was found liable for a RICO conspiracy based on blackmail, fraud, and extortion. Most significantly, his former FBI handler, Jonathan Buma, was arrested for unlawful disclosure of confidential information in March and faces trial in December. Johnson has bragged about collaborating with Buma to leak information long after he stopped being an informant.
Whether civil or criminal, Johnson will be tied up in court for the foreseeable future, with serious consequences on the horizon.