Judge Throws Out Leftist Nevada AG’s Phony ‘Fake Electors’ Case Against Trump Supporters
Lawfare leftists lost another round in their bogus “fake electors” scheme to imprison Trump supporters, this time in Nevada where the state’s Democrat attorney general is pushing an 11th-hour political prosecution.
Clark County District Judge Mary Kay Holthus on Friday shut down a trial slated for early next year in the case of six grassroots conservatives charged with felony forgery counts for serving as contingent electors for then-President Donald Trump in the disputed 2020 election. The judge found prosecutors for far-left Attorney General Aaron Ford erred in choosing Democrat bastion Clark County, home to Las Vegas, as the venue for the trial. As the Nevada Independent reported, the judge agreed with the defendants’ attorneys, who argued the a northern venue should have been selected, particularly within Carson City — where the alternate elector signing ceremony actually took place in the weeks after the presidential election in which Democrat Joe Biden narrowly claimed victory in the swing Silver State.
“You have literally, in my opinion, a crime that has occurred in another jurisdiction,” Holthus reportedly said. “It’s so appropriately up north and so appropriately not here.” (Holthus is the same judge who was attacked in January by a defendant during sentencing.)
Ford’s political prosecution against Jim DeGraffenreid, Durward James Hindle III, Jesse Law, Shawn Meehan, Michael McDonald, and Eileen Rice can no longer be taken up in a northern jurisdiction because the three-year statute of limitations expired in December, as the Nevada Independent notes.
But Ford isn’t giving up. He reportedly claimed the “judge got it wrong” and plans to appeal the ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court.
As the Nevada Independent noted, Ford told lawmakers at a hearing in May 2023 that state law “did not directly address the conduct in question.” The attorney general made the comments as legislators considered “a bill that would have criminalized” attempts to put up alternate presidential electors. The legislation was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican.
But Ford brought charges seven months later, insisting that “his office had been conducting an investigation into the scheme for years and denying that it was politically motivated,” the publication reported.
‘Political Persecution’
Hans von Spakovsky, constitutional law expert and former member of the Federal Election Commission, said it’s the highly partisan attorney general who has erred in bringing the “abusive prosecution” of Trump supporters. He’s confident Ford will lose his appeal.
“It’s a political persecution,” von Spakovsky, manager of The Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, told me in an interview. “The only reason he would file this now after all these years is because he wanted to interfere in the upcoming election.”
The same could be said for swing state Wisconsin, where far-left state Attorney General Josh Kaul earlier this month filed phony “fake electors” charges months after his own Department of Justice said there was no crime. As I noted at the time, the Democrat’s charges against Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis, as well as political operative Michael Roman, curiously arrived just a few days after a Manhattan kangaroo court found Trump guilty in a Soviet-style show trial.
As I reported:
The leftist AG was taking a lot of heat for failing to deliver the heads of Trump’s allies on a political platter, despite the fact that the Wisconsin Elections Commission had twice rejected complaints from a leftist lawfare group about the Republican alternate electors. Interestingly, the Wisconsin Department of Justice said the Republicans who attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump did not violate any election laws.
Kaul’s agency “concluded that Republicans were legitimately trying to preserve Trump’s legal standing as courts were deciding if he or Biden won the election,” the Associated Press reported.
Von Spakovsky said either Kaul is now saying his own DOJ lawyers were incompetent or he’s overriding them for political reasons. The constitutional law expert believes it’s the latter.
Civil Rights Violations
Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan also are targeting Trump supporters in similar politically driven prosecutions. All are being led by Democrat prosecutors, including Fulton County, Georgia’s legally and ethically suspect district attorney Fani Willis.
In each case, the alternate electors have argued they were not breaking the law, but protecting Trump’s rights should his campaign prevail in legal challenges in the hotly contested battleground states.
Von Spakovsky said the Nevada prosecution is more of the same from Democrats who have tried every trick in the book to politically take out Trump, including the unconstitutional scheme to remove the Republican from the primary ballot.
He also noted there should be a legal reckoning for the kinds of civil rights abuses going on in left-led prosecutors’ offices in recent years.
“There are federal Civil Rights statutes that the Justice Department has the ability to enforce, to go after state judges and state prosecutors and others who are abusing the legal process to interfere with individual civil rights and others under the constitution,” the former DOJ counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights said. “I hope if Donald Trump wins the election that his DOJ goes after state attorneys general and prosecutors for what they’ve been doing.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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