Michigan Fake Electors Get Real Indictments, Might Get To Go To Real Prison

Fuck around, find out, etc.

Michigan AG Dana Nessel

It’s time for another week of bad consequences happening to bad people.

Donald Trump is screaming his underpants off because Special Counsel Jack Smith is probably about to start dropping indictments in his January 6 investigation. Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis could start dropping indictments any day now. Meanwhile, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel just indicted a bunch of fake electors for their part in the overall scheme to overthrow the government and overturn the 2020 election they lost. (For a quick refresher, Joe Biden beat Trump in Michigan by almost three full percentage points. It wasn’t close. This was literally just white pig racists whining.)

Nessel is charging 16 people — 16 old balls Republicans, the youngest two of them are 55 — with felonies for going into the basement of the Michigan Republican Party and affirming multiple times on documents that they were “the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president of the United States of America for the state of Michigan.” They were not that.

They sent the docs to the Senate and the National Archives, because they wanted then-Vice President Mike Pence to have the courage to use their fake elector certificates instead of the real ones from the real world, where Joe Biden beat the shit out of Donald Trump.

These are the first electors to be criminally indicted, but, boy oh boy, we hope not the last.

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All their charges are the same. From the Michigan AG’s website:

• One count of Conspiracy to Commit Forgery, a 14-year felony,

• Two counts of Forgery, a 14-year felony,

• One count of Conspiracy to Commit Uttering and Publishing, a 14-year felony,

• One count of Uttering and Publishing, a 14-year felony, 

• One count of Conspiracy to Commit Election Law Forgery, a 5-year felony, and,

• Two counts of Election Law Forgery, a 5-year felony.

Uttering and also publishing! Sounds very serious, go to prison.

Nessel said:

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” said Nessel. "My department has prosecuted numerous cases of election law violations throughout my tenure, and it would be malfeasance of the greatest magnitude if my department failed to act here in the face of overwhelming evidence of an organized effort to circumvent the lawfully cast ballots of millions of Michigan voters in a presidential election.” […]

“The evidence will demonstrate there was no legal authority for the false electors to purport to act as ‘duly elected presidential electors’ and execute the false electoral documents,” Nessel continued. “Every serious challenge to the election had been denied, dismissed, or otherwise rejected by the time the false electors convened. There was no legitimate legal avenue or plausible use of such a document or an alternative slate of electors. There was only the desperate effort of these defendants, who we have charged with deliberately attempting to interfere with and overturn our free and fair election process, and along with it, the will of millions of Michigan voters. That the effort failed and democracy prevailed does not erase the crimes of those who enacted the false electors plot.”

In recorded remarks, Nessel added that these people were lying and they knew it. “They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it.”

Here is some video of Nessel ‘splaining it:

Articles are being compiled about who these electors are and what their favorite “Wheel of Fortune” puzzle category is and how they grew up to be such dumb stupid idiots. One of them is a small-town mayor. One is a realtor. One is a dairy farmer. A lot of them are heavily connected Republican Party officials and clownasses who participated in one of the Kraken lawsuits to overturn the election in Michigan.

One of them is bonkers piece of shit then-Republican Party co-chair Meshawn Maddock, a bigoted nutcase who once called Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl.” She was also an early adopter of the easily debunked hoax that kids who identified as “furries” were being given litterboxes at school.

People who believe one insane thing tend to believe other insane things. Like that Donald Trump won Michigan. Maddock is now complaining that this is “political persecution” and told NBC News in an email that "democrats [sic]” are doing “lawfare” to her because they know they cannot beat Donald Trump in 2024.

(By the way, Maddock’s idiot husband, Michigan GOP state Rep. Matt Maddock, introduced a bill in 2021 to register and fine fact-checkers, we guess because he was mad fact-checkers were always calling bullshit on him and his idiot wife. Explaining his bill at the time, he whined about “fact checkers who have been injected into our First Amendment right to be wrong if we want to.”)

One of the indicted fake electors, Michele Lundgren, said last year that she didn’t even know she was signing up to be a fake elector. “I didn’t even know what an elector was, let alone a fake elector,” said Lundgren. “I signed nothing but what appeared to be a sign-in sheet.” And then she signed up to bring brownies to the next meeting and then she showed up with the brownies but nobody ate them because there was no meeting.

So they are all just really very legal and very cool people.

It remains to be seen what January 6 accountability will look like on a federal level for January 6 and the plot to overturn the election, what kinds of charges Jack Smith might ultimately bring against Trump and others. (Norm Eisen and a bunch of other smartypantses published a 264-page model prosecution memo at Just Security this month, detailing the possibilities.)

Jennifer Rubin argues in a new column that Nessel’s indictments are notably specific and narrow, leaving Smith a hell of a lot of room to bring his own great big cases, and perhaps lending newfound urgency to that effort.

Whatever happens, we’re just glad we get to watch these folks starting to get what’s comin’.

Go to prison, motherfuckers!

[Michigan AG website / NBC News]

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