LANSING, Mich. — The Michigan Attorney General’s Office filed six briefs on Monday asking a judge to advance charges to trial against Republican electors who signed a document in 2020 falsely claiming Donald Trump had won the state’s election that year.
The submissions — 20 days after Trump secured a second term in the White House in the 2024 election — were a sign that Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office plans to continue pursuing the criminal allegations, involving some of the president-elect’s top allies in Michigan.
Asked on Nov. 14, if the investigation into the false electors would continue in Michigan, Kim Bush, a spokeswoman for Nessel, told The Detroit News, “Yes, this is still an active case.”
On Monday, special counsel Jack Smith sought to dismiss federal charges against Trump himself for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Smith cited a constitutional prohibition against prosecuting a sitting president.
Meanwhile, also on Monday, lawyers for Nessel’s office made their latest filings in the state-level cases against the Michigan Trump electors from 2020.
Ingham County District Court Judge Kristen Simmons previously held three sets of preliminary examinations to weigh whether prosecutors had presented enough evidence to show there’s probable cause to believe crimes were committed by the GOP electors.
Simmons required Nessel’s office to submit its final written arguments for why the charges should be sent to trial for the first group of six electors by Monday.
The cases center on certificates the Republicans signed on Dec. 14, 2020, falsely claiming that Trump had won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes and they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors.” Trump’s campaign eventually used the documents in an unsuccessful bid to reverse his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Knowing that they did not win the election, they agreed to each sign a fraudulent certificate claiming that they had won the election and that they were Michigan’s electors, and purporting to cast Michigan’s electoral votes,” Nessel’s office wrote in its filing Monday. “They did this with the intent to present the document and have it used in lieu of the legitimate votes that day.
“This was an agreement to commit forgery, uttering and publishing and election law forgery with specific intent.”
On July 18, 2023, Nessel first announced eight felony charges against each of the 16 Republicans whose names appeared on the false electoral certificate.
One of the electors, James Renner of Lansing, later reached a cooperation agreement with Nessel’s office, and the charges were dropped against him. So the cases against 15 of the 16 remained ongoing on Monday.
Defense lawyers have argued that their clients didn’t have an intent to defraud anyone when they signed the certificates and were merely acting on the advice of Republican legal counsel.
“It’s a politically motivated witch hunt that has no basis in the evidence,” John Freeman, a defense lawyer from Troy, who’s representing GOP elector Marian Sheridan of Bloomfield Hills, said earlier this year.
The defense attorneys for the first set of Republican electors have until Dec. 30 to file their own written briefs. It’s unclear how quickly Simmons might make a decision on whether to advance the cases after that date.
In the new filings, Nessel’s office said the false electors had signed a certificate “replete with objective lies that they knew were false, and the fraudulent electors hoped that their certificate would be accepted rather than the legitimate one.”
“This is the specific intent to impair a legitimate government function,” the Attorney General’s Office contended.
The attorney general’s briefs featured Facebook messages from Dec. 5 and 6, 2020, between two of the GOP electors: former Michigan Republican Party Co-Chairwoman Meshawn Maddock of Milford and Amy Facchinello of Grand Blanc
“Have you received any communication about being an elector? I have not gotten even a letter or a single phone call. I have zero ideo (sic) what is happening,” Facchinello wrote.
“Well, we are no longer electors unfortunately,” Maddock replied, days before signing the electors certificate.
Later, Facchinello added, “If the Republican Party doesn’t rise to the occasion, President Trump will start his own political party and everyone will shift.”
The briefs also featured text messages between two other GOP electors: former Republican National Committeewoman Kathy Berden of Snover and John Haggard of Charlevoix.
“I see Meshawn posted in Facebook even though we were all asked to keep silent as to not draw attention to what other states were doing similar to ours,” Berden wrote.
Nessel’s office said in their filings that there was “no requirement that these defendants be the masterminds behind the fraudulent certificate and there is no requirement that these defendants be the creators of the false certificate.”
“By signing the false certificate, they adopted its false contents as their own,” the attorney general’s briefs said. “The fraudulent certificate of votes was falsely made, forged or counterfeit.”
Similar filings are due for the other sets of Trump electors on Dec. 30 and Jan. 30.
Six Republican electors from 2020 are slated to serve as GOP presidential electors this year, including Facchinello, Haggard, Maddock and Sheridan.
