After a court hearing over her recent disclosure of Dominion Voting Systems internal emails, a pro-Trump attorney who attempted to rig the 2020 election was taken into custody on Monday.
For failing to show up for recent court appearances in her separate criminal case in Michigan, where she was accused of plotting to take voting machines following the 2020 election, the attorney, Stefanie Lambert, had an active arrest warrant.
By making thousands of internal corporate emails publicly available in recent days and leveraging the revelations to revive bogus allegations about voting fraud, Lambert and a group of election deniers have thrown a wrench in one of Dominion’s numerous pending defamation lawsuits.
When Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, who has supported conspiracy theories over the 2020 election and utilized his position to look for alleged voter fraud against Donald Trump, received the private Dominion documents from Lambert, commotion broke out. Leaf has shared more than 2,000 internal Dominion documents on social media in the past day.
Because Lambert is the attorney for former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who is being sued by the voting business for defamation due to his false statements during the 2020 election, she was granted access to the Dominion files.
Though Lambert was never seen leaving the courtroom during Monday’s hearing in Byrne’s defamation case in Washington, DC, speculations about whether she had been taken into custody circulated among the other attorneys.
Lambert’s arrest was verified by the US Marshals Service late on Monday.
“The arrest of Stefanie Lambert early this afternoon may be confirmed by the U.S. Marshals Service. In reference to her criminal case centered in Michigan, the statement stated that Lambert was presently being detained on local charges.
For the time being at least, the Dominion leaks have drawn attention away from the purported defamation linked to the 2020 election.
There will be more hearings to address the situation and give the court a chance to think about Lambert’s possible outcomes.
Additionally, Dominion’s attorneys stated in court documents that following the revelations, staff members of the company are already getting new threats of death. Employees of Dominion are identified by name, email address, cell phone number, and office address in the texts that Leaf has posted online.
Lambert was barraged with pointed questions by Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya over the contested Dominion files during the occasionally heated hearing on Monday. Lambert’s access to the database holding the Dominion papers will be restricted, the judge ruled.
Upadhyaya stated, “I need to maintain the status quo for the time being, and we need to stop any further dissemination. I will address the why later.”
The judge announced that Byrne would have to show up and respond to questions at a later hearing to decide whether Lambert breached a court order by disclosing the Dominion files. Dominion wants Lambert removed from the case and made a suggestion in court on Monday that she may have broken the law by giving Leaf access to the data.
In court documents submitted before the hearing, Dominion attacked Lambert and Byrne, calling their allegations of Serbian intervention in the US election “xenophobic” and pointing out that Lambert was on the verge of facing sanctions due to her involvement in absurd, conspiracy-theorizing election litigation.
Dominion is suing several other pro-Trump individuals, including right-wing television networks Newsmax and One America News, as well as former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, for spreading similar falsehoods regarding the 2020 election.
The largest recorded defamation judgment in US history was reached last year when Dominion paid $787 million to resolve a lawsuit against Fox News.
