(LifeSiteNews) – An appeals court ordered two leaders of an election fraud watchdog group released from jail after they were imprisoned for contempt of court.
Catherine Engelbrecht, founder and president of True the Vote, and Gregg Phillips, data investigator for the group, were ordered released from detention on Sunday by a panel of circuit judges consisting of Catharina Haynes and Trump appointees Kurt Engelhardt and Andrew Oldham.
Engelbrecht and Phillips were jailed on October 31 after U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt found them in contempt of court for refusing to reveal the identity of an individual present during a meeting at which they were allegedly given proof that the election management software company Konnech had “improperly stor[ed] the personal data of “millions” of U.S. poll workers on a server in China,” according to The Texas Tribune.
Hoyt had ordered that the election integrity advocates be imprisoned until they “fully comply” with the court order by divulging the name of the unidentified analyst present at the January 2021 meeting. Phillips shared during one hearing that the individual is an FBI informant, as is Mike Hasson, another of the sources in question.
“Every name I give you gets doxxed and harassed,” Engelbrecht argued, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Konnech founder and CEO Eugene Yu currently faces felony charges in Los Angeles, including grand theft by embezzlement and conspiracy to commit a crime, according to Reuters, for allegedly giving contractors in China access to data that was supposed to remain in the United States.
Phillips and Engelbrecht had repeatedly claimed that Yu was an agent for the Communist Party of China and that China had used poll worker data obtained from Konnech to influence the 2020 election.
The company subsequently filed a civil suit against True the Vote, alleging that their claims have inspired threats against Yu’s family and harm to his reputation.
Engelbrecht issued a statement in response to the order for the pair’s release, declaring, “Those who thought that imprisoning Gregg and I would weaken our resolve have gravely miscalculated. It is stronger than ever.”
“The right to free and fair elections without interference is more important than our own discomforts and even this detention, now reversed by a higher court.”
Engelbrecht has previously worked with conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza on the documentary 2,000 Mules, which purported to present surveillance footage and cell phone geotracking data proving that thousands of individuals collaborated to drop off multiple ballots per person at different drop boxes throughout major swing states to help Joe Biden oust Donald Trump from the White House.
Claims of 2020 election fraud have circulated among many conservatives due to a variety of ballot and voting machine irregularities witnessed and testified to by poll watchers, data analysts, and others.
The prevailing mainstream media narrative holds that stolen election fears are a “debunked conspiracy theory” on the grounds that legal challenges to the election results failed in court. But while some of the legal briefs filed on Trump’s behalf were flawed, many others were dismissed over process issues without a judge ever considering their contents.