Michigan lawyer in voting machine tampering case arraigned in D.C.

Stefanie Lambert, an attorney who represents an ally of former President Donald Trump being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation and who faces felony charges for attempting to unlawfully possess voting machines in Michigan, was arraigned Tuesday in the D.C. Superior Court on charges of being a fugitive from justice.

Lambert was arrested Monday by the U.S. Marshals Service after appearing at a hearing as the lead attorney for Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne in the Dominion case, the agency confirmed to CyberScoop. Following the Monday hearing, all lawyers and attendees exited the room and the doors were locked, while Lambert was asked by the judge to stay and subsequently arrested, according to The Washington Post.

Following her arrest, Lambert was turned over to the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. Superior Court. According to an affidavit filed in the D.C. Superior Court on Tuesday, the arrest warrant was issued March 8 and the charge for Lambert is listed as “Failure to Appear – Fraud.”

The charges against Lambert relate to her failure to appear at a March 8 hearing in Michigan on felony charges related to the unauthorized possession of voting machines and tabulators. Lambert was in Washington as the lead attorney representing Byrne, who is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after claiming that the company’s voting machines were rigged to favor  President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

In an arraignment hearing Tuesday, a lawyer representing Lambert told the court that the failure to appear was due to “confusion,” saying Lambert understood she had a bench warrant filed for her arrest but had filed a motion to change the date of her hearing and believed her attorney “was supposed to continue matters up there” while she came to Washington for Byrne’s hearing.

Lambert’s attorney told the court that “she plans to leave today, to get in her car and go up” to Michigan to appear before the court as soon as possible. He also noted that Lambert has “three young children, one with special needs, that she needs to get back to.”

Magistrate Judge Heide Herrmann ordered Lambert to post a $10,000 bond before being released and set an April 24 extradition hearing that Lambert must attend in person. She also gave Lambert until Wednesday morning to make her Michigan court appearance.

“As long as there is still a warrant out for your arrest, you can continue to be arrested over and over again, here in D.C., Michigan or somewhere else along the way,” Herrmann told Lambert.

Last year, a special prosecutor tapped by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel brought criminal charges against Lambert and two other individuals for unlawful possession of a voting machine, willfully damaging a voting machine, and conspiracy to commit unauthorized access to a voting machine.

According to a letter sent by Nessel to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in 2022, Lambert and eight other individuals allegedly worked to deceive local Michigan election clerks in Roscommon County, Richfield Township, Lake City Township, and Irving Township in order to obtain voting tabulators and make copies of election management reporting software that they intended to examine for evidence of voter fraud.

Lambert is one of three individuals who have been formally charged in the case thus far, along with Michigan Republicans Matthew DePerno and former state Rep. Daire Rendon.

Apart from these incidents, Lambert was deeply enmeshed in efforts by the Trump campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election by claiming massive amounts of voter fraud — claims that were rejected across the country in dozens of subsequent court challenges. She was part of a lawsuit in 2020 led by attorney Sidney Powell, a Trump campaign attorney who helped lead then-President Trump’s nationwide legal challenge against the election results and who last year reached a plea deal with Georgia prosecutors over a separate election subversion case.

That lawsuit, along with every other election fraud lawsuit filed by Powell, was dismissed for lack of evidence, and in 2021 a federal judge sanctioned Powell, Lambert and other lawyers associated with the case, fining them more than $175,000.

In 2021, Lambert began working with investors interested in proving that voting machines had been hacked and connected with a Pennsylvania resident and financial backer who allegedly provided Lambert with a $1 million line of credit to, in part, hire cyber forensic investigators. Lambert hired cybersecurity firm XRVision, promising to pay $550,000 for an examination into whether voting and election systems in Antrim County, Mich., and later Fulton County, Pa., had been hacked to favor a particular candidate, according to court documents.

When those reports determined that there was no evidence of hacking or voter fraud, Lambert allegedly “requested that the [firm] write a report stating that there were cheat codes in the software and that there was evidence of remote/local hacking of the elections systems.” When XRVision refused, Lambert and her client were “furious,” demanded their money back and refused to pay the $350,000 fee for the Fulton County analysis, according to a lawsuit filed by XRVision in 2023.

According to a court order issued last Wednesday, Lambert and her law office have also “evaded service [of the lawsuit] and are in default” in the case. The judge ordered the parties to enter into arbitration to resolve the case.