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Your questions are very closely related. First, as to the function of a lyophilizer, all it does is to remove the water from the material placed into it. In other words, if you put a mixture of spores, vegetative cells and culture medium into it, you will get dried spores, vegetative cells and culture medium. If you put a water suspension of very highly purified spores into it, you will wind up with dry very highly purified spores.
The articles I keep going back to (and linked in the post at my signature) present the two ideas driving my current thinking. The first is that very reputable scientists have seen electron micrographs of the attack material and they report that there appears to be nothing besides spores in the material.
The second is the speculation by Ed Lake that suggests that the surface chemistry of the spores themselves, when they are very pure and dry, will prevent clumping and even allow some aerosolization of them. Note that the spores themselves are only one micron long. If they don't clump, then they already are of a size that physically will allow them to stay in the air a long time if lifted by a microcurrent of air. That takes away any need for milling: if the spores are cleaned of all the other material that would have been present at the end of the culture process, they will "look" milled because they are so small. Note also that the postal workers were infected because it is estimated that the pores in the paper of the envelope were on the order of 50 microns, so even though the seams were sealed with tape, as the envelopes were compressed by the sorting equipment, some spores easily were "squeezed" out through those relatively larger pores.
I previously was of the opinion that the attack material had to have been produced at Dugway, but the concepts described above make me less sure of that. Now, I am beginning to believe the assertion that someone moderately skilled in microbiology could have produced the material. Working in their favor is the fact that bacterial endospores in general are extremely tough. They will withstand treatments that would completely disrupt and render into solution all of the materials that would have been present at the end of the culture process. Cleaning the spores really wouldn't take that much expertise. If Ed Lake is correct about the surface chemistry, then getting to very clean spores in water suspension only leaves the step of drying them. I'm not even convinced a lyophilizer is essential for that final step.
As for the NY Post sample, I've seen reports that it clumped due to getting wet, but I've also seen one report (I don't remember where) that said that particular sample was only 10% spores where the Daschle and Leahy samples were virtually 100% spores. That would be consistent with the Post sample being dried from a preparation that had not yet been cleaned completely. The Robert Stevens sample was not recovered, but he died of inhalation anthrax, so it's not clear that all of the material in the first set of mailings was impure.
Finally, in the previous thread I did address the issue from the NYTimes article about the attack material matching a particular sample in Ivins' control that is 85% Dugway strain and 15% Fort Detrick strain. As is also pointed out by Dr. Meryl Nass, that does not finger Ivins, it merely narrows down where the attack material came from. Anyone with access to that sample could have used a small portion of it as a starter culture.
Finally, I second the commenters who have noted that although Ivins' vaccine work challenged animals with aerolsolized spores, it appears that they used liquid suspensions of spores to make those aerosols. That can be found in the methods sections of their publications.
