Michigan Judge Dismisses Charges Against ‘Fake Electors’ for Trump
“This is a fraud case, and we have to prove intent. And I don’t believe there’s evidence sufficient to prove intent.”
Cannot let this fall under the radar!
Ingham County District Judge Kristen Simmons dismissed the criminal charges against supposed “fake electors” for President Donald Trump in 2020.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appointed Simmons to the bench in 2019.
“This is a fraud case, and we have to prove intent,” Simmons said during the court hearing. “And I don’t believe there’s evidence sufficient to prove intent.”
In 2023, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed felony charges against 16 Michigan Republicans for allegedly trying to overturn the election for Trump.
The Republicans attempted to enter the Michigan Capitol on December 14, 2020, to “cast the state’s electoral votes to Trump.”
The Michigan State Police denied them entry.
Prosecutors used the documents to prove election fraud.
But the defense argued that “the documents were signed at the instruction of Trump campaign lawyers.”
Michigan never charged the Trump campaign officials.
The state dismissed charges against James Renner after he agreed to testify.
Well, Simmons said Renner’s testimony did not prove intent:
But Simmons said testimony offered in the case made it clear — the electors were instructed by the Trump campaign that they were acting in the event results were overturned for Trump. Simmons said the charges require an element of intent. She recalled the witness testimony of James Renner, a Republican fake elector who was initially charged then had his case dismissed after agreeing to testify.
Renner testified he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong when he signed the documents. Simmons, who described Renner as the government’s “chief witness,” said his testimony indicated a lack of intent.
“He was led to believe that their actions were part of some legitimate political (action),” Simmons said. She said it was more likely the Trump campaign attorneys withheld information from the electors, but noted no charges had been brought against the campaign.
“This case hinges on the element of intent of these actors,” she said. “This is not the intent of (Shawn) Flynn, the intent of (Kenneth) Chesebro, (Rudy) Giuliani or Donald Trump.” Flynn, Chesebro and Giuliani are all former attorneys of the Trump campaign.
Simmons also criticized Special Agent Howard Shock, the lead investigator:
Simmons also questioned the efficacy of prosecutors’ lead investigator, Special Agent Howard Shock, who works in Nessel’s office. Shock took the stand during preliminary examinations, and at the time Simmons said he did not provide a “great presentation” of his findings. Shock, at times during his testimony, had difficulty recalling certain details of his investigation, and Simmons noted Sept. 9 the court had to pause during his testimony for Shock to refresh his recollection of events.
Ouch!
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Comments
There is no crime in this case.
That’s what the judge said.
This is written better than CNN’s TDS tainted version.
When Hillary had alternate electors it was praised as a genius political move.
No, she didn’t. Please stop making things up.
She sort of did. Several Democratic electors pledged to vote for alternate candidates in states Hillary won in hopes of convincing Republican electors to change their votes and deny Trump the 270 he needed putting the process into The House. 5 or 6 Dems did voter for “alternate candidates” and in that sense they were alternate electors.
That is not even remotely similar, not even on the same planet. Crawford claimed she had alternative electors. People who had not been chosen by their state as electors, purporting to cast votes.
Clinton made no attempt at all to do that. Every single one of her electors was properly chosen by their state and certified as that state’s genuine electors. Nothing alternative about them at all.
Having been chosen, as the law stood at the time they had the right to vote as they saw fit. And they had the right to lobby their fellow electors in other states on how they should vote. Exactly like members of Congress, who are not bound to vote the party line, are entitled to change their minds, and routinely lobby each other to change their votes.
SCOTUS has since said that states can bind their electors, even though they can’t bind their congressmen. But that wasn’t the case at the time. And even now many states have no law binding electors.
In any case this has nothing at all to do with the topic, which is alternative electors, who cast votes in case it should later transpire that they were the valid electors all along. Hawaii’s two slates did that in 1960, just to preserve their options, and that’s what the Trump campaign advised these people to do.
No one had a problem with it in 1960, and if the Dems believed that that’s what these people were doing they wouldn’t have a problem with it this time either. The problem they have is that they don’t believe that’s what it was about. They are convinced that this explanation was a lie, and that the alternative electors knew they were fake and deliberately cast false votes. They can’t accept that on our side we genuinely believed we had won those states, and still hoped to win a decision to that effect, either in court or in congress. It’s pure TDS.
It is exactly the same although you refuse to see it. The Hillary electors were bound to vote for her but chose to vote for an alternate candidate acting for all purposes as alternate electors. Same thing.
No, it is not the same thing at all. You don’t seem to understand what an elector is. An elector is an elected official, just like a congressman. An “alternative elector” is someone who is not currently believed to be a duly chosen elector, but casts a vote anyway in case some later event makes it turn out that he is an elector after all.
It’s exactly the same as the loser in a disputed house race taking an oath, and casting a “vote” in case he later ends up being declared the winner, in which case he wants his vote to be retroactively counted and his opponent’s vote not counted.
All of which is completely and utterly different from a duly elected congressman changing his mind about how he will vote on some bill. Which is what those Hillary electors did. There was nothing alternative about them, no matter how they voted.
I don’t think their states had bound them, but even if they had, SCOTUS had not yet ruled that states can do that.
It’s what the constitution provides for a dubious election. An ineffective plan structurally, which is what happened.
The procedure did provide the first two episodes of VEEP season 5 I think. An election where everything that can go wrong did go wrong, played for the background complications.
No, it doesn’t. Please stop making things up.
Your going to have to point out that section which authorizes alternate electors to me as I can’t find it. Having alternate electors in the event challenges in states are successful is not illegal and was done several times before. That lawfare against them was the first shot across the bow of what was coming to anyone who bucked the DC establishment.
“Shock took the stand during preliminary examinations, and at the time Simmons said he did not provide a “great presentation” of his findings. Shock, at times during his testimony, had difficulty recalling certain details of his investigation, and Simmons noted Sept. 9 the court had to pause during his testimony for Shock to refresh his recollection of events.”
They all have to refresh their memories. This comment does not tell me if it was a James Comey-type intentional memory failure.
Its legal when D’s do it, but not when R’s do it. That was the prosecutor’s claim.
Basically, the issue is that there’s a deadline for the electors to vote. So, what are you supposed to do when the election results are very close AND being contested in the courts? These R electors did, or actually merely tried to do, what D electors have done in other States in the past (going back to Nixon’s 1960 election with Hawaii being very close and actually ending up certifying a different candidate than was leading on election night) – they vote for their candidate, openly stating that their votes are contingent on the final results of the election being for their guy.
So, you have two slates of electors – each voting for opposing candidates. Registering their votes prior to the deadline. Then, depending on how the legal battles play out, eventually a winner is declared and the slate of electors that voted for that candidate have their votes forwarded to the Senate for certification. The other slate’s votes get tossed.
That wasn’t their claim. Their claim was that there was never any doubt about the result, the Republican electors knew Trump had lost their state, and tried to vote anyway in the full knowledge that they were not the electors chosen by the state.
This is much like the way opponents of the RKBA claim that we on the pro-RKBA side know we’re wrong; we know that the 2A doesn’t mean what it plainly says, and we know that restricting the right would be guaranteed to save thousands of lives, but we cynically pretend otherwise because we don’t care about the children, and we’re all getting money from the gun manufacturers. Or something like that.
It doesn’t even occur to them that we don’t know those things, let alone that those things might not even be true!
From what more I read, the judge was actually rolling her eyes and shaking her head and smirking during Shock’s testimony. Apparently AG Nessel thought the case was going to be an easy slam dunk in a Democrat-dominated court room, but this judge wasn’t having any of it. Good to see there are still honest judges out there who aren’t playing games. That guy Shock must be some schnook.
One of my friends was a victim of this sham. Her family lost everything. Is there any compensation for them?????
Just like the minorities who lost businesses in the Floyd fiasco in Mpls – Gov. Walz had and $18,000,000+ surplus – ZERO when to business owners who lost all – ZERO. But Walz hired a ton more state govt workers – kind of like Biden on aspirin.
This was a foolish case in the first place. There is no law against a candidate having an alternate slate of electors ready to go if an election challenge is successful. As I read elsewhere “Judge dismisses elector fraud charges, Simmons Governor ambitions hardest hit”
There is no law against it, but the Dems can’t accept that that’s all it was. Because they can’t accept that there was ever any question that they’d won those states.
Strange how that happens. Dems accept election results when it suits them. People forget Democrats in the joint session in 2017 standing up one after the other in objecting to the election on grounds of Russian interference and other wild claims because there was no way Hillary could have lost. To his Credit, VP Biden shut them all down immediately.
“Shock, at times during his testimony, had difficulty recalling certain details of his investigation, and Simmons noted Sept. 9 the court had to pause during his testimony for Shock to refresh his recollection of events.”
Yeah, because the most likely thing is he, like the rest of the left, never expected Trump to win all his cases nor actually get reelected in 24. Another guy who thought it would be a cakewalk to put people in prison.
Now the question is can the people charged sue since even the judge said the evidence was so flimsy it didn’t even meet probably cause standards.
edit — probable cause and not probably cause 😀
Prosecutors have absolute immunity.