A judge in Michigan has tossed out a case against electors who supported Donald Trump after the 2020 election. The case had been dragging on for years but ultimately the Democratic-appointee decided there was no evidence of criminal intent.
A Michigan judge threw out criminal cases on Tuesday against 15 people who acted as fake electors in a bid to promote the election of Donald J. Trump in 2020, saying the state had not established that there had been any intent to commit fraud.
The ruling is the latest major setback to efforts to prosecute allies of Mr. Trump who sought to keep him in power after he lost the presidential election that year.
“I don’t believe that there’s evidence sufficient to prove intent,” Kristen D. Simmons, a state district court judge in Lansing, said in court. Judge Simmons is an appointee of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat...
“Right, wrong, or indifferent, it was these individuals and many other individuals in the state of Michigan who sincerely believed, for some reason, that there were some serious irregularities with the election, or with the voting, and that somehow their candidate didn’t receive all the votes that was intended for them,” Judge Simmons said. “This is not for the court to decide whether that was true or false. But this was their belief and their actions were prompted by this belief.”
Dana Nessel, the AG who championed this case for years, seems to sense that her credibility had just taken a major hit.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat who brought the case, said at a press conference after the hearing that she believed the judge made a “very wrong decision.”
The GOP electors “knew Donald Trump lost, they lied anyway, and that is a crime,” Nessel said, referring to the now-dismissed felony charge of signing fraudulent election papers.
“This is the most dangerous slippery slope for American democracy, when courts decide that violations of election laws shouldn’t even be heard by a jury,” Nessel said. “I am terrified for the 2026 elections… If they can get away with this, what can’t they get away with next?”
Naturally, defense attorneys were pleased with the outcome.
Mary Chartier, a lawyer for one of the electors, said the case had been “a political prosecution from the start” and called the judge’s ruling “America at its best.” John Freeman, another defense lawyer, said “the entire case lacked any evidence of criminal wrongdoing” and was “based on wishful thinking and fantasy.”
The most surprising reaction, at least to me, comes from the Washington Post's editorial board which published a reaction under the headline "The collapse of Democratic lawfare in Michigan." The editorial argues the charges were a bad fit and that Democratic lawfare against Trump in general has backfired.
Though the Trump campaign’s challenges to the 2020 election were destructive and culminated in violence on Jan. 6, 2021, they were not a secret.
Fraud and forgery charges are therefore a poor fit for the alleged behavior. “Typically, people who are seeking to defraud or deceive do not gather and make a spectacle of that,” Simmons said. That’s why it took prosecutors more than two years to bring indictments. These were a useful complement to Democratic political efforts to keep the 2020 election front and center. (Nessel got a prime speaking slot during the party’s national convention last summer in Chicago.)
The attorney general says she is considering an appeal of Simmons’s ruling, but the legal threshold to overturn a dismissal would be high. It would be better to lay the matter to rest. Democrats tried to use prosecutions as an adjunct to their political strategy in the run-up to the 2024 election. That has backfired spectacularly. There are growing signs that Republicans might be attempting the same destructive strategy by selectively pursuing criminal investigations against their opponents. They would deserve the same result.
The twist at the end turns this into another criticism of Trump, but the thrust is that Democrats have engaged in lawfare against Trump for a long time and done so for political benefit (or at least perceived political benefit). That link about lawfare backfiring goes to a previous editorial about the Letitia James judgment against Trump which was wiped out last month.
Though the judges laid out differing views, all rejected the state’s punishment of Trump. Two of the judges would have upheld the lower court’s fraud finding against Trump but voided the fine. Two of the judges would have sent the case back for a new trial because of serious errors. A fifth judge would have tossed the case altogether.
That fragmentation is partly a result of the novelty of the case concocted by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). In 2018, she made pursuing Trump part of her campaign. This message resonated in a state Trump had lost two years earlier by 22 percentage points. But it also cast a cloud over her motives as she charged Trump with overstating the value of properties he owned to get better rates on loans and insurance. Aggressive accounting is common in the real estate business, and banks didn’t sue or lose money on the deals.
The lawfare has gone on long enough. This is the end of the case in Michigan but there are similar cases in several other states, none of which seem to be going anywhere. Having committed to this political strategy years ago, Democrats are not in a position now to complain that the Trump administration is following their lead.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Hot Air's conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join Hot Air VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member