Attorney Dana Nessel, surrounded by her family, publicizes her bid for Michigan Attorney General in Braun Court Ann Arbor on Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2017.
Mandi Wright | Detroit Free Press | Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Michigan’s attorney general on Tuesday criminally charged 16 so-called “fake electors” for former President Donald Trump, accusing them of a fraudulent effort to reverse President Joe Biden’s victory within the state’s 2020 election.
The 16 people each face eight charges, including conspiracy, election law forgery, and uttering and publishing, state Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a video announcement.
Nessel called the alleged plan a “desperate effort” to “undermine democracy.” Several of the accused are energetic in Republican politics.
Nessel has not ruled out potential criminal charges against additional defendants, her office said.
The case is the primary time that any members of faux Electoral College slates for Trump have been criminally charged.
Nessel’s announcement also got here hours after Trump said that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith has designated him a goal in a federal criminal probe of attempts to undo the ex-president’s loss in 2020.
Smith’s investigation is targeted on, amongst other things, the attempted use of faux Electoral College slates to thwart Biden’s victory.
The alleged Michigan scheme
On Dec. 14, 2020, weeks after Biden defeated Trump by greater than 154,000 votes in Michigan, the defendants met covertly within the basement of the state GOP headquarters and signed documents claiming to be the legally qualified electors for the state within the Electoral College, based on Nessel.
“That was a lie,” Nessel said. “They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and every of the defendants knew it.”
After that meeting, “a few of the false electors attempted to enter the state Capitol and deliver their fabricated electoral votes to the Senate floor, but were turned away,” she said.
The bogus electoral documents were then sent to the U.S. Senate and the National Archives “with the intent that Vice President Mike Pence would overturn the outcomes of the election using the false electoral slate,” Nessel said.
Nessel said the defendants are: Kathy Berden, Rose Rook, Mayra Rodriguez, William “Hank” Choate, Meshawn Maddock, Mari-Ann Henry, John Haggard, Clifford Frost, Kent Vanderwood, Stanley Grot, Marian Sheridan, Timothy King, James Renner, Michel Lundgren, Amy Facchinello and Ken Thompson.
The fees announced Tuesday have maximum possible prison sentences of as much as 14 years. The defendants have been given per week to give up on the fees, said Nessel, whose office said the investigation is constant.
CNN reported in early 2021 that Maddock, the co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party was heard on an audio recording at a public event as saying, “We fought to seat the electors. The Trump campaign asked us to try this.”
Nessel on Tuesday noted that three days before the fake electors met and signed the fraudulent documents, the U.S. Supreme Court had dismissed a lawsuit by the state of Texas difficult the election leads to Michigan, in addition to in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Other states under scrutiny
Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes helped provide Biden together with his margin of victory against Trump.
The Electoral College, not the favored vote, determines the winners of presidential elections.
Allies of Trump in Michigan and a number of other other states, arguing falsely that he was the victim of widespread ballot fraud, assembled would-be slates of Electoral College members with an eye fixed toward asking then-Vice President Pence to just accept the slates as valid.
Along with Michigan, the so-called alternate electors’ slates got here from Arizona, Georgia, Latest Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Pence, as a part of his constitutional duties, presided over a joint session of Congress that began meeting Jan. 6, 2021, to certify Biden’s victory within the Electoral College.
Pence rejected a push by Trump, and Trump’s lawyer John Eastman, to just accept the then-president’s electors in states Biden won. The proceeding was disrupted by the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob of Trump supporters, causing Pence and members of Congress to flee and conceal.
“The evidence will exhibit there was no legal authority for the false electors to purport to act as ‘duly elected presidential electors’ and execute the false electoral documents,” Nessel said Tuesday.
“Every serious challenge to the election had been denied, dismissed, or otherwise rejected by the point the false electors convened,” Nessel said. “There was no legitimate legal avenue or plausible use of such a document or an alternate slate of electors.”Â
Last summer, an Atlanta prosecutor told all 16 individuals who acted as fake electors in Georgia were targets of her criminal probe of Trump and his allies for his or her try to undo Biden’s victory in that state.
At the least half of those Georgia fake electors since have reached immunity deals with the prosecutor, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, based on a court filing in May.
