Thanks for making the streets less safe.
After spending nearly a week in jail, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips — leaders of Texas-based right-wing voting activist group True the Vote — have been released. They’d been held for contempt of court since Halloween, having repeatedly refused to release the name of a man they called a “confidential FBI informant” who is a person of interest in a defamation and hacking case against them.
The person remains unidentified.
Their release came after True the Vote’s lawyers appealed the contempt order by federal district Judge Kenneth Hoyt to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, arguing the finding of contempt was in error and the pair should be released from jail. The appeals court granted their release but kept the remainder of Hoyt’s order in place.
[…]
In the week since Engelbrecht and Phillips were escorted to federal detention, they have turned their plight into a national public relations and fundraising blitz. Former President Trump, speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania last week, defended Engelbrecht, calling her “incredible” and a “patriot.”
“And she’s now in a Houston prison along with another great patriot. And you know what they did? They went out and they saw illegal ballot stuffing,” he told the crowd, conflating the Konnech debacle with the “2000 Mules” documentary, a separate True the Vote project. “Can you imagine? They put her in prison. She’s in jail. What a disgrace. Our country’s going to hell in so many different ways.”
Engelbrecht and Phillips were not held in “prison” but rather the Joe Corley Federal Detention Facility, which is a temporary lock-up facility used by the U.S. Marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and is not run by the Bureau of Prisons. Still, they repeatedly claimed to be in “prison” in their many fundraising efforts of the past week.
The day after their arrest, a True the Vote staff member sent a message to supporters, saying Engelbrecht was in “federal prison.”
See here for the background. I don’t know what kind of leverage exists to force an absolutely resistant defendant to comply if contempt is off the table, but perhaps this isn’t the final word on the matter. Maybe a default judgment will become a possibility at some point. These two are dedicated grifters and their basic strategy is to try to frustrate everyone into giving up. I sure hope the judge here will have some more tools in the box to prevent them from getting away with it.
Maybe freezing bank accounts and imposing million dollar per day fines would help with compliance. Or, grant default judgement to Konnech for a billion dollars.