'Righteous anger' as criminal case into Trump-led Michigan false electors falls apart

Michigan’s so-called “false electors” case is over after Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Monday she would not appeal a judge’s decision to dismiss the charges faced by 16 individuals who signed documents attempting to certify Michigan’s slate of electors for Donald Trump in 2020, despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

In a sweeping 110-page report, Nessel said that she still believes false electors committed crimes, but concluded that the resource-intensive case would be unlikely to ultimately succeed. She also said it was “fundamentally unjust” to continue prosecuting lower-level participants in an effort she said was led by the now President Donald Trump, who she said is unlikely to ever face his own criminal charges.

“We considered that Michigan’s Republican elector nominees, who eventually became Michigan’s false slate, did not design or demand this criminal conspiracy. As shown by the Report of Special Counsel Smith regarding these matters, this was indeed Trump’s criminal conspiracy,” the report said. “The dismissal of the false slate charges does not change the facts, and it does not change history. What Michigan’s false slate did was wrong.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The individuals charged in July 2023 — primarily with offenses related to forgery — included Stan Grot, the Shelby Township Clerk, and Meshawn Maddock, former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and wife of State Rep. Matt Maddock. Charges against one of the 16 were earlier dropped as part of a cooperation agreement.

Votebeat reached out to several of the now-former defendants but did not immediately hear back Monday.

Judge Kristen Simmons, of the 54-A District Court in Lansing, dismissed charges against the remaining 15 defendants in September. Simmons, an appointee of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, said she felt there was not sufficient evidence from the prosecutors to prove the alleged “false electors” had criminal intent.

Simmons ultimately decided not to bind the case over for trial, meaning she believed prosecutors had not presented enough evidence at the preliminary stage to move the case forward.

The report details that prosecutors believe an appeals court would have sided with Nessel’s office on the argument that forgery is not just a property crime, as Simmons had found. But proving that element of criminal intent Simmons highlighted could have been “more complicated.”

The unusually detailed report exists “to ensure that the full record of what happened, and why it mattered, is fully and accurately documented,” according to its opening lines, even though the criminal case will not move forward.

Legal experts say it's rare for a state attorney general to publish such an in-depth report after declining to file charges. In other states — including Nevada, Wisconsin and New Mexico — false elector cases have been dismissed, narrowed or otherwise stalled without a comparable public explanation. Trump last year issued a sweeping federal pardon for dozens of people involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the so-called false electors, but his pardon power doesn’t extend to state charges.

That Nessel, who is term-limited and will leave office Jan. 1, chose to publish such a sweeping report underscores how politically and emotionally charged the issue remains five years later, said Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame law school.

“There are a lot of people who were duped with misinformation with respect to the results of the 2020 election," Muller said. “There's a righteous anger after what happened. But you can have righteous anger and still not have criminal activity, and I think that's just sometimes the difficulty of situations like this.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

This article first appeared on Bridge Michigan and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.