'Open-and-shut': Law professor says Michigan fake Trump electors have no defense

ALSO READ: Terror move backfires as 'loser' Proud Boys' socialist hate collides with love for donuts

'Open-and-shut': Law professor says Michigan fake Trump electors have no defense
Donald Trump (Photo by Nicholas Kamm for AFP)

The 16 fake Trump electors who tried to convene in Michigan got a big surprise this week: felony indictments brought by the state attorney general.

And it's going to be almost impossible for them to defend against the case, argued New York University law professor and former Pentagon special counsel Ryan Goodman on CNN Tuesday evening, for one key reason: the documents they are accused of forging contain a glaring lie.

"If you're going to charge 16 people there and hundreds of people, you're charging a lot of people with a lot of stuff," said anchor Erin Burnett. "It'd be kind of odd to not charge one person out of all of this. Some of the evidence in Michigan that the attorney general points to is language on the fake elector slate that was submitted to Congress. So they submit this to Congress. And in that you saw something very important. It said, 'we convened and organized in the State Capitol.'"

"So if you're an elector, you're going to convene there," said Burnett. "They said that's what they did. But they actually met at the Republican state headquarters, according to the January 6th Committee report, which I guess is not in the State Capitol, the pro-Trump attorney flagged this as slightly problematic in a memo to the Trump campaign. Now, anyone watching may say this seems like a detail. It is a detail, but a detail you think matters."

"It's a detail that matters," agreed Goodman. "It mattered to the Trump campaign lawyer, and he said this is a problem. He is mapping out the secret memo how they can do these false electors across the seven states. Michigan may have a problem because it's a legal requirement that you have to convene in the State Capitol. That's why they obviously put it in their declaration that we are convened in the State Capitol. And it is just a falsehood."

That's significant, Goodman added, because, "They can say, oh, we thought Trump won the election and that's why we did this. Did you think you were in the Capitol? You are not in the Capitol, you were in the basement of the GOP headquarters in Lansing. That's where you were when you convened. It's a false statement that they submitted to state and federal authorities that is almost an open-and-shut forgery."

Watch below or click the link here.

Ryan Goodman says Michigan fake electors case is "open-and-shut" www.youtube.com

For customer support contact support@rawstory.com. Report typos and corrections to corrections@rawstory.com.

RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth plant Army doctor at HHS to chase a COVID vaccine theory: report

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has an Army doctor in his department investigating whether COVID vaccines killed troops.

According to a Thursday Politico article, Army physician Theresa Long testified in a federal court in Virginia that she is now working alongside Kennedy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to examine whether service members died from COVID shots that were mandated under President Joe Biden in 2021.

Hegseth assigned her to serve as Kennedy's senior medical military adviser, a role at the HHS that had not surfaced publicly until now, according to Politico.

Long said in an August 14 deposition that she is reviewing whether 2,544 deaths among troops, figures reported to a federal vaccine-injury database but never verified, can be tied to the shot, Politico reported. She told the court she hoped to wrap up her research within roughly a year.

Kennedy, a longtime skeptic of vaccine safety, has repeatedly attacked the COVID vaccines, once branding them the "most deadly vaccines in history," Politico noted. Public health experts have said his characterization is false and warn it has pushed some Americans away from shots that can blunt the disease.

Much of Long's task centers on claims that the mRNA formulas from Pfizer and Moderna raise the risk of heart inflammation, according to Politico. However, a 2026 Pentagon report cited by Politico found that while myocarditis and pericarditis cases ticked up soon after vaccination, the effect was "not sustained over a 1-year period." The Pentagon report noted no deaths.

Long testified that she remained doubtful of the military's own data, which at one point appeared to show the vaccine performing extraordinarily well, according to Politico. She claimed that officials inflated the numbers until it "made it look like the vaccine had, like, cured everything," according to a transcript of her testimony reviewed by Politico.

She added that she knew of 28 people who died because of the COVID vaccine but was barred from saying more, Politico reported.

THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING! ALL ADS REMOVED!

Shocked Trump slams Maria Bartiromo's firing in late-night post: 'A true warrior'

President Donald Trump reacted with disbelief to the firing of Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo in a late-night Truth Social post.

Bartiromo abruptly left Fox News with an announcement on Thursday. Reporting by the "Status" newsletter revealed that she was fired after leaking to Trump that Fox News had told staff to steer clear of lending credence to his claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 election.

"I can't believe Maria Bartiromo is no longer going to have her great show (s) on FoxNews/Business," Trump wrote. "Three different shows, always number one. Maria is a total professional, and a true warrior. Her fans, of which there are many, will not be happy."

He signed off, "God bless you, Maria!"

Trump triggers "frightening sign" as billions in gold flee New York vaults: expert

Fears that President Donald Trump could freeze foreign assets are driving billions in gold out of New York's vaults, an economics journalist warned.

In a Thursday article for The Bulwark, economics editor and columnist Catherine Rampell described the gold retreat as a signal of how far U.S. relationships, in particular with its European allies, have deteriorated.

"In a frightening sign of just how much trust has been lost between the United States and its erstwhile allies, billions of dollars of gold reserves are being repatriated or otherwise moved out of Trump's reach," Rampell wrote.

The Dutch central bank announced on Wednesday that it had moved roughly $12 billion in gold, most of it held in New York, to vaults in London, Rampell noted. France's central bank recently sold about $15 billion in bullion stored in New York and replaced it with bars kept in Paris. Germany and Italy, which are the second- and third-largest holders of gold reserves behind the U.S., have spent the past year weighing whether to bring theirs home too, Rampell added.

The concern is less that Trump would seize the gold than that he might freeze it, Rampell explained. Washington and its allies did the same with Russia's reserves after the invasion of Ukraine, she pointed out.

A German member of the European Parliament, Markus Ferber, warned that the risk is impossible to dismiss, she noted.

"Trump is erratic, and one cannot rule out that someday he will come up with creative ideas how to treat foreign gold reserves," Ferber said, per Rampell.

Rampell admitted the scale of the fear caught her off guard.

"It hadn't really occurred to me that investors might be diversifying away from U.S. dollar-denominated assets because they also feared losing access to them," she wrote.

The nervousness has built during a string of Trump moves, including his "Liberation Day" tariffs, his threats to annex Greenland, his push to take "golden share" stakes in private companies, and his stated wish to personally inspect Fort Knox, according to Rampell.

Because gold sits inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Trump's campaign to control the Federal Reserve feeds fears that foreign reserves could be next, Rampell wrote. A representative of Germany's Taxpayers Federation put it bluntly, she noted.

"It's our money," the representative said. "It should be brought back."

Copyright © 2026 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | Manage Preferences | Debug Logs RS+
For corrections contact corrections@rawstory.com , for support contact support@rawstory.com .

{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}