Michigan attorney Stephanie Lambert plans to return home after she was released following her arrest in a Washington, DC courtroom stemming from the criminal case against her for allegedly orchestrating a plot to illegally gain access to voting machines in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Lambert has had a bench warrant for her arrest outstanding for over a week after she failed to appear for a court hearing in the criminal case against her for refusing to comply with a court order issued several months earlier to undergo fingerprinting.
With the warrant still outstanding, Lambert appeared Monday in Washington, DC for a hearing in the US District Court for the District of Columbia in a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems against her client Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who has spread conspiracies about the 2020 election.
The US Marshals Service arrested him in the courtroom, according to Brady McCarron, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service. She was subsequently charged as a fugitive in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia, wanted for failing to appear in Michigan.
During her arraignment Tuesday afternoon in DC Superior Court, a judge released her, telling her she had to post an unsecured $10,000 bond, an amount she would pay if she failed to turn herself in on the bench warrant. A court-appointed attorney said Lambert planned to leave Tuesday and drive back to Michigan and turn himself in by Wednesday.
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DC Superior Court Judge Heidi Herrmann encouraged Lambert to do exactly that and set an extradition hearing in the event Lambert did not turn himself in on the warrant.
The warrant came after Lambert — an ally of former President Donald Trump — failed to show up for a court hearing in her criminal case in Oakland County on March 7 regarding a court order issued several months earlier requiring her to undergo fingerprinting with which she had not yet complied. That led to the warrant for her arrest.
During a hearing last Wednesday, Oakland County Circuit Court Chief Judge Jeffery Matis presided over Lambert’s case denied a request to set aside the bench warrant after Lambert had days to turn himself in. Lambert is fighting the fingerprinting order in the Michigan Court of Appeals.
In court filings, she argued that her failure to appear for the March 7 hearing was not willful, citing a communication breakdown with her previous attorney. She also argues that the fingerprinting order violates her right to due process and asserts that the special prosecutor in the case against her will improperly use the information to compare with evidence collected from the voting equipment she allegedly handled.
Among her efforts related to the 2020 election, Lambert participated in a Michigan lawsuit that served as a vehicle for conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and was also involved in an unsuccessful legal bid spearheaded by attorney Sidney Powell to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan and award the state’s Electoral College delegates to Trump.
Amid legal setbacks in the cases related to the 2020 election, Lambert traveled across Michigan to convince local officials to carry out their own election audits.
Michigan voting machine case:Bench warrant issued for pro-Trump Michigan lawyer facing criminal charges
Last August, Lambert was indicted by a grand jury for allegedly joining other Trump allies in a conspiracy to gain illegal access to voting machines after the 2020 election. She has repeatedly blasted the special prosecutor’s review that led to the charges. She has accused Democrats of trying to silence her in a plot to keep Trump out of office in a video posted to her Telegram account on the eve of her indictment.
When Muskegon County Prosecutor DJ Hilson announced the charges against Lambert last August, he noted that he took the unusual step of petitioning to convene a grand jury. “These charges were authorized by an independent citizens grand jury,” Hilson said in a statement at the time. “Protecting the election process is of the utmost importance for our state and country.” He called the prosecutor “an important step in that direction.”
Contact Clara Hendrickson:[email protected] or 313-296-5743. Follow her on X, previously called Twitter,@clarajanehen.
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