A Trump-supporting lawyer who tried to have the result of the 2020 election overturned was released from a Washington, D.C., jail Tuesday after her arrest on a Michigan warrant in connection with election-tampering charges.
Stefanie Lambert, 42, was released on a $10,000 bond after she vowed to immediately surrender to authorities in Michigan. She’d been taken into custody in the capital on Monday after she took part in a court hearing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation case against her client Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, whom Dominion has accused of spreading lies about the 2020 election.
D.C. Superior Court Magistrate Judge Heide Herrmann said Lambert would not have to pay the $10,000 bond as long as she honors the bench warrant issued by a judge in Michigan, according to Reuters. The judge also warned Lambert that she could be arrested again if she fails to comply with the warrant, but an attorney assured Herrmann that Lambert planned to drive to Michigan on Tuesday to appear in court. The lawyer added that Lambert planned to turn herself in by Wednesday, according to the Detroit Free Press.
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The warrant was issued earlier this month after Lambert failed to appear at a March 7 hearing in the Michigan case, in which she is charged with illegally breaching voting machines. A state prosecutor also accused her of refusing to comply with a court order to submit fingerprints.
At the separate defamation hearing in D.C. on Monday before her arrest, Lambert acknowledged leaking internal Dominion documents during the case’s discovery phase, CNN reported. She had access to the emails through her representation of Byrne and passed them to Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf in Michigan. Leaf has pushed baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and has investigated claims of purported voter fraud in the run-up to President Joe Biden’s victory four years ago.
A social media account using Leaf’s name and image has been publishing thousands of pages of the internal Dominion documents. Lambert told The Detroit News this week the records show “evidence of criminal acts including honest service fraud, wire fraud and foreign nationals in our election equipment while the votes were being counted.” Leaf separately wrote a letter to House Republicans on Sunday warning that the U.S. had permitted a scenario “where potentially Serbian military criminals are running our elections and remotely entering our election equipment.”
Dominion’s lawyers filed an emergency motion last Friday arguing that Lambert should be disqualified from representing Byrne in the case, saying her sharing of the files was in violation of a protective order. The attorneys claimed Lambert’s actions had “led to new threats” against Dominion employees, including a March 9 voicemail from a caller saying: “America should just fucking hang all you motherfuckers.”
The motion also said the documents disclosed by Lambert “show absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any ‘criminal activity’” and that as best as Dominion can tell, “Byrne and Lambert’s xenophobic conclusion is that any email from non-US-based Dominion personnel is conclusive evidence of criminal activity.”
A federal magistrate judge overseeing parts of the defamation case on Tuesday ordered Byrne and Lambert to “immediately desist from sharing, distributing, providing access to or discussing any discovery material” they’d been given over the course of the Dominion proceedings.
