← The Lawfare Podcast
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- [00:01]
Lawfare Host
Nearly every News alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security. And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions. You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at 202-643-846, or by sending a recording of yourself asking your question to ask us anything lawfairmail.com by December 16.
- [00:39]
Darina
Hi, I'm Darina, co founder of Quo. You might know us as OpenPhone. My dad is a business owner, and growing up, he always kept his ringtone super loud so he'd never miss a customer call. That stuck with me. When we started quo, our mission was to help businesses not just stay in touch, but make every customer feel valued, no matter when they might call. Quo gives your team business phone numbers to call and text on your phone or computer. Your calls, messages and contacts live in one workspace so your team can stay fully aligned and reply faster. And with our AI agent answering 24. Seven, you'll really never miss a customer. Over 90,000 businesses use Quo. Get 20% off@quo.com tech that's Q U O.com tech and we can port your existing numbers over for free. Quo no missed calls, no missed customers.
- [01:34]
Blue Apron Ad Voice
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- [01:39]
Lawfare Host
I swear.
- [01:39]
Clara Hendrickson
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- [01:42]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
What?
- [01:43]
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- [01:45]
Clara Hendrickson
This is a Paper Listen ad. Please confirm your billing.
- [01:47]
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Clara Hendrickson
No subscription?
- [01:55]
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- [02:16]
Isabella Royo
I'm Isabella Royo, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare archive for November 22, 2025. On November 13, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that a criminal forgery case may go forward against six individuals who falsely claim to be presidential electors in order to certify the 2020 election in favor of President Trump. This case is proceeding at the state level, placing it outside the scope of presidential pardons. Four days prior, on November 9, US pardon attorney Ed Martin had announced presidential pardons for 77 individuals linked to efforts to subvert the 2020-20 election, including the six alleged fake electors in Nevada. For today's archive, I selected an episode from August 16, 2023, in which Quinta Jurecic and Clara Hendrickson discussed the then ongoing criminal proceedings against fake electors in another swing state, Michigan. They unpacked the charges against three people who allegedly accessed voting machines without authorization. The reasons why Michigan became such a hotbed for election conspiracies in 2020 and more.
- [03:24]
Quinta Jurecic
I'm Quinta Jurecik, a Senior Editor at LawFair, and this is the Lawfare Podcast August 16, 2023. On July 18, Michigan Attorney General Dana Dessel unveiled criminal charges against C16 people, the so called fake electors from that state who featured in Trump's effort to hold on to power in 2020. Just a few weeks later, a special counsel in Michigan announced additional charges related to the 2020 election, this time against three people who allegedly accessed voting machines in the state without authorization. So if you've been tracking developments when it comes to accountability for misconduct surrounding the 2020 election, it's best not to take your eye off Michigan. To discuss, I sat down with Clara Hendrickson, a politics reporter at the Detroit Free Press. We talked through the backstory behind these prosecutions and why Michigan became such a hotbed of conspiracy theories and alleged crimes in 2020. It's the Lawfare podcast August 16th explaining the Michigan fake electors prosecution.
- [04:37]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
We're going to talk about two different criminal cases in Michigan, the prosecution of Michigan fake electors, and then a related story that has to do with separate criminal charges related to tampering of voting machines. So let's start with the first. What are the charges that were unveiled against the Michigan fake electors?
- [04:57]
Clara Hendrickson
Sure. So last month, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nestle announced criminal charges against a group of 16 Michigan Republicans who allegedly participated in an effort to overturn the 2020 election by signing a phony certificate pledging Michigan's Electoral College votes to Trump even though he lost in the state. So they face multiple felony charges, including conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to commit election law forgery. In all, they face up to 85 years behind bars. And this is an older group for some of them. That could mean that if convicted with all of these charges, they could be potentially spending the rest of their lives in prison.
- [05:47]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So talk to me a little bit about what exactly this scheme is that they've been charged over. I think that listeners might be at this point familiar with kind of the broad strokes of the fake electors scheme, that it was an effort by the Trump campaign to sort of create at first sort of contingency slates of electors to retain the possibility that Trump could win, and that it then moved closer to sort of outright fraud. What happened in Michigan? How did this play out? Sure.
- [06:16]
Clara Hendrickson
So well, I guess my first. My first experience with this whole situation of alternate electors. It goes all the way back to December 14, 2020. We had a colleague who was at the Michigan Capitol the day that Michigan's actual presidential electors met and cast the state's Electoral College votes for Joe Biden. And a really interesting thing happened outside of the Capitol building day. There was a group of Republicans who were nominated by the Republican Party here to cast Michigan's Electoral College votes in the event that Trump won. He didn't, but they showed up anyways and tried to get into the Capitol building that day. They were denied entry. And then, you know, at the start of 2022, we learned that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nestle, her office had been considering bringing charges against that group of people because they apparent sent a certificate claiming that they were the duly elected presidential electors for Michigan. They weren't. And that they had met in the Capitol to cast the state's Electoral College votes. They didn't. They sent that to the National Archives in an effort, we know now, that may have tried to thwart the will of voters in 2020. And so that is at issue right now in this criminal case. It's the first case that we're seeing nationally, even though there were multiple states where these altern slates of electors convened. It's the first case in Michigan where criminal charges are being brought against the group of folks whose names actually appear on that certificate.
- [07:57]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And so how did we get to the point where the state attorney general is charging these individuals sort of in parallel with the federal investigation? As you mentioned, there's been a lot of discussion about fake electors around the country. There's been a lot of focus recently on the Fulton county investigation in Georgia. But maybe this is just my east coast chauvinism. I feel like the Michigan case was kind of a sleeper. It kind of came out of nowhere when Nestle announced it.
- [08:23]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah, not. Not your east coast chauvinism. It definitely sort of surprised some folks here in Michigan who have been covering this, because at the start of 2022, Nestle announced that her office had been considering bringing charges for a year, but ultimately decided to refer the matter to the feds because she thought the feds at the time were better suited to take on an investigation that appeared to span multiple states in a kind of coordinated effort to overturn the 2020 election. And so it wasn't something that we were necessarily anticipating, I guess, at the time. She didn't rule out potentially bringing criminal charges. But after inaction from the federal authorities, she said on the two year anniversary of January 6, the start of this year, that her office had reopened its criminal probe into this group of Michigan Republicans whose names appeared on this phony certificate. And now, you know, last month she, she announced that she was, she was going to charge this group.
- [09:33]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So let's talk about the specific people who have been charged. You spoke with some of them before the election when you did a project interviewing the various electors, both on the Democratic and Republican side.
- [09:46]
Clara Hendrickson
Who are they?
- [09:47]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
What did they you. Are there any sort of shared characteristics that jumped out at you about this group?
- [09:54]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. So it's a sizable group and it sort of spans the spectrum from folks who have held leadership positions within the Republican Party, folks who are a little bit more involved at the local level, whether it's county Republican politics or congressional district level politics. But I kind of put them into three separate categories. So you have the folks who've held prominent leadership positions, former Michigan GOP co chair Michonne Maddock, her husband is a state lawmaker here in Michigan, and the Republican National Committee woman for Michigan, Kathy Burden. And then you have a group of local officials. There's a local township clerk who's actually in charge of running elections in his community. The Michigan elections director recently said that because of the criminal indictment, he's going to be barred from carrying out those duties. And there's a school board member near the Flint area and a mayor of a city on the west side of the state. And then the rest of them kind of fall into the bucket of enthusiastic Trump voters who kind of got involved in Republican politics a little bit more recently, including a group of people who participated in there was that Sidney Powell lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan. Some of them were plaintiffs in that case. I talked to most of these folks back in 2020 when they were just candidates to be presidential electors. A lot of them at the time expressed that the 2020 election for them was this sort of stark choice between saving the republic and democratic socialism. And they talked about the importance of serving as electors, said it was a very important role that they were taking very seriously. So it's been interesting to revisit those conversations three years later, now that they're facing criminal charges because of how they handled that role or thought that they really were presidential electors.
- [12:09]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And do we have any indication, either from the arraignments, from the charging documents themselves in Michigan, or the many reports that have come out about how these folks are thinking about their role in what the special Counsel's office has asserted as a conspiracy. Are they, you know, has anyone had their Road to Damascus moment, or are people still sort of believing that they really did the right thing?
- [12:36]
Clara Hendrickson
Well, a lot of them will say, well, we, I guess I'll, I'll put it this way. We. There's sort of two, two reactions and defenses that we've heard so far. One is that we were tricked or deceived into signing something and we weren't fully informed of what the document said. There's Michelle Lundgren, who's one of the folks charged here, and she said she thought she was just signing her name to a sign in sheet when she went to that meeting where they said that they signed the document saying they were duly sworn electors. And then you have Michonne Maddock, who has publicly said this was all just a thing to have just in case some of the legal challenges from Trump allies succeeded and a court decided that Trump actually won Michigan. We wanted to make sure that we had the documents in place to ensure that our Electoral College votes would actually count. So those are the two main defenses we've heard so far.
- [13:38]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And all of the fake electors have so far pleaded not guilty. Is that correct?
- [13:43]
Clara Hendrickson
Correct.
- [13:44]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So one of the things that I found interesting about this was that, as you say, I feel like during the January 6th Committee's investigation, during the hearings, there is a general sense that, yeah, some of these people who signed on as fake electors were really like, all in for sort of as far as this would go. And others were perhaps kind of roped into this under what they claimed were false pretenses. Were you surprised to see that all 16 of the fake electors were charged? Because from what you say, it sounds like some of them might be trying to or might be able to offer kind of better defenses about having been tricked rather than having intentionally gone along with this plan.
- [14:26]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah, I guess I wasn't surprised to see all 16 of them charged, all of their names appear on the document. And I think for Nestle, her argument is that they all knew what they were doing. They were allegedly engaged in a conspiracy, knowingly signing a phony document with the intent to defraud. But I'm sure as these cases proceed, we'll hear different things about what people knew and when and how closely some of these folks may have been coordinating with the Trump campaign, which some of them have publicly said helped coordinate and lead this effort.
- [15:06]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
Yeah. So let's talk about that a little bit what do we know about the role of the Trump campaign in helping move this forward?
- [15:15]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. So we have the testimonies from Laura Cox, who's the former Michigan GOP chair, and then RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. They testified before the January 6th committee. And Cox told the committee that she spoke with a Trump ally who proposed originally having the Republican electors sleep overnight in the Capitol because Michigan law requires the electors to convene on the Senate floor to cast the state's Electoral College votes. She said that that was a ridiculous idea and inappropriate and that slumber party situation never actually manifested.
- [15:59]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And to be clear is they would need to sleep overnight because the Capitol during the day there would be people doing things that they were supposed to be doing. And so they would need to kind of stick around after the fact to pull this off.
- [16:09]
Clara Hendrickson
Well, there were restrictions about who could enter the Capitol building that day, so only the officials sort of presiding over the Electoral College vote and the presidential electors themselves were admitted into the Capitol, which is why when the Republicans showed up saying, we're the electors, let us in, the Michigan State Police lieutenant said, you can't come in here. We're not letting anyone else here. And the electors have already shown up and Michigan law requires them to be in the senate chamber at 2pm I think in a. I was just revisiting one of the memos saying that it would be a bit awkward in Michigan to potentially carry out an effort to seat an alternative slate of electors because of that requirement. So I think that was the impetus for the sleepover idea.
- [16:58]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So I cut you off. You were talking about how McDaniel and Cox were discussing sleepovers.
- [17:03]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. And then McDaniel told the January 6th committee that John Eastman, who was a lawyer advising Trump and others in an effort to overturn the election, talked to her about the RNC helping with the effort to see alternative electors and reaching out to them and assembling them. And she said that the Trump campaign took the lead and that the RNC was just helping them in that role.
- [17:28]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
Right. So that seems to kind of sketch out a story where this is not like a bunch of self starters in Michigan sort of decide to do this just on their own. It's very much according to the testimony and the documentation we have from the January 6th Committee and the. The alleged actions as described in the Michigan charging documents. This is really something that is coordinated with the Trump campaign as part of Trump's ongoing efforts to stay in power.
- [17:56]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. And I should note that one of the documents filed by The Attorney General's office, in support of the criminal charges, said that Cox and the RNC helped organize the meeting at the Michigan GOP headquarters in Lansing, where the fake electors allegedly convened in the basement. And there, according to the attorney general's office, a Trump campaign aide, Sean Flynn, spoke to the group. So I imagine we'll be hearing a lot more about those details and what was said as these cases proceed.
- [18:32]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So how has the Michigan Republican Party responded to these allegations? Because what you're describing, as you say, there's one group of people who are sort of enthusiastic Trump voters who began participating in politics relatively recently. But also you're describing a situation where the sort of institutional Michigan GOP is really closely involved with something that the attorney General has now alleged to be a crime. Has the Republican Party said anything? Have they tried to distance themselves from this?
- [19:03]
Clara Hendrickson
No, they have not, because they have accused Michigan Attorney General Dana Nestle, instead of exhibiting authoritarian tendencies and weaponizing her office, to go after this group. It was shortly after Nestle announced the charges that the Michigan GOP put out a statement saying that they're going to be closely monitoring these cases and vowed to, quote, recruit and deploy activists as needed, and that it was really fascinating to see them put out that statement because it kind of stood in stark contrast to the statement put out by one of the Republican legislative leaders here in Michigan. You all might remember Matt hall, he was the Republican who invited Rudy Giuliani to testify before the state House oversight committee in 2020, where Giuliani encouraged lawmakers to insert themselves in the election on behalf of Trump. And that whole hearing was sort of parodied on snl. But Matt hall put out a different statement that said that the charges Nestle brought are really serious and that she bears the burden of showing that they're not politically motivated. So you have authoritarian tendencies coming from the Michigan gop. And burden of proof here is on Nestle to ensure that she's not misusing her powers from the legislative leader.
- [20:35]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
That's really interesting. Is that kind of divide present? Has that been present elsewhere in the reaction to the fallout from January 6 and efforts to overturn the 2020 election between the party and Republican legislators? Or is this a new division?
- [20:53]
Clara Hendrickson
Well, of course, there were a lot of GOP legislators in 2020 who were supportive of efforts to investigate claims of fraud and wrongdoing. There are some folks who have embraced claims that the election was stolen. But increasingly, we're starting to see this divide between the official party apparatus and their sort of of full embrace of election denialism and Republicans who are in office and are in the minority and want to flip control of the chamber, who've sort of said that we're not going to keep focusing on the 2020 election. That's proven to be a loser for us here in Michigan.
- [21:39]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So that gets to the fact that Michigan is, I think it's fair to say, tell me if I'm wrong, a purple state. It was a swing state, Obviously, in the 2020 election, which is part of, of why it featured so prominently. Can you kind of walk me through, like, why it is that Michigan became so important? Obviously, again, no shade to the great state of Michigan. But why, why Michigan as opposed to, say, Pennsylvania? It became such a linchpin for so many of these conspiracy theories, which I do want to talk about, and other legal efforts to overturn the election.
- [22:15]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah, well, I feel like Michigan sometimes gets called a purple state. Lean Democrat, lean Republican, swing state. The New Yorker just declared Michigan a Democratic stronghold. I wouldn't go that far. But obviously Michigan has played a really central role in the last two presidential elections. In 2016, Trump won Michigan by a really small margin, just over 10,000 votes, which is why Michigan was kind of front and center again in 2020 in a big target of Trump's false stolen election claims. So it's a very closely contested state. I think in 2024 we'll see whether or not that 2016 presidential victory for Trump was kind of a fluke or if it's something that he might be able to repeat again under favorable circumstances.
- [23:11]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
Part of the way that Michigan became so central in the narratives around 2020 had to series of conspiracy theories, I think it's fair to say that kind of really took hold among right wing media and kind of, I feel like, created this idea that Michigan was a hotbed of election fraud. So tell me a little bit about those theories. Like what, what is it? I mean, you're, you're here in, in Michigan reporting on this at the time. What was it like for you seeing all of these theories kind of come up and having to report them out and bat them down?
- [23:47]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah, it was constant. It was like playing Whack a Mole. And it was tough because it was kind of a constant race against time, watching social media and Trump's tweets and just the numbers of likes and retweets going up exponentially while I was in the middle of fact checking some of the claims he was making. So it was just, it was really tough in the moment. But, but in retrospect it's been really helpful to kind of have a record of how these claims got picked up and having really sort of clear debunking of them. One of the biggest claims that kind of got elevated by Trump and his allies, there was an human error in Antrim County, a small county in northern Michigan. There wasn't an update that was performed. And so basically what happened was when the results were uploaded, the vote totals weren't matched to the right races, and so the results kind of got jumbled. There was nothing wrong with the machine and the machine's ability to tabulate the ballot, but it was an example of an error that could be easily corrected and identified shortly after the problem occurred. But that window created an opening for disinformation to spread. And Matt DiPerno, who's actually facing criminal charges in a separate matter to undermine the results of 2020 election, he was the lawyer behind a lawsuit targeting Antrim county and what happened there. And that really became a vehicle to spread all kinds of conspiracies about voting machines.
- [25:42]
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- [27:46]
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- [27:46]
Clara Hendrickson
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Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
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- [28:13]
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Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
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- [29:46]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
Yeah, so I definitely want to talk about the criminal charges against SuperNow. But let's also to sort of continue painting the picture, talk about some of the civil litigation that was taking place around the election. So you mentioned there's that DiPerno litigation. There's also, as you mentioned, the. The. The famous Kraken case filed by Sidney Powell and her team of lawyers, some of whom were from Michigan. Others came in, like Powell, from outside. Just tell me, tell me a little bit about those Cases, you know, how many were there? What were the arguments? How did they do in court?
- [30:20]
Clara Hendrickson
Oh, gosh, I've lost track. There were so. There were so many. It was just one of those situations where I think it really made me appreciate that there's. It now seems that there's the election day and the actual voting that takes place, and then there's the battle in courts now, like elections have become very litigious affairs, and we were all pretty exhausted, just sort of divvying up coverage, responsibility for the various lawsuits. But another one that I'll add to the list, it was one that was filed in Wayne county, where Detroit is located, in targeting the absentee ballot counting in Detroit, saying that there were all kinds of problems with ballot duplication. And Republican monitors who were observing the count claims that a bunch of Biden ballots that weren't valid were brought into the middle of the night to be counted. So all of that was debunked. And then we saw those same claims later show up in the Sidney Powell Kraken lawsuit. None of these cases succeeded. And in fact, some of the attorneys involved have been sanctioned for their participation in these legal efforts to try and either delay the certification of the vote or overturn the election altogether.
- [31:41]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about the sanctions, because I think that's an interesting thread of the story, too.
- [31:46]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. So those stem from the Sidney Powell lawsuit. There were nine lawyers involved in that lawsuit, and the federal judge who heard that case imposed sanctions on all nine of them, ordering them to pay legal fees for the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit and then participate in continuing legal education. And they were all referred to the Attorney Discipline Board in their jurisdictions. We just had a ruling from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding sanctions for all but two of them. So those payments are going to be due soon, but that's sort of the status now. And just this week, the court dismissed a petition to have the entire bench rehear the case. So that's where the sanctions stand.
- [32:42]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
Yeah. So the fallout from this, even separate from the criminal cases, is very much still ongoing, it sounds like.
- [32:50]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. But it also makes me wonder how much money some of these attorneys receive for representing clients in these cases and how big of a financial hit the sanctions will end up being.
- [33:03]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
All right, so let's talk about the charges against DiPerno and two other folks, one of whom I believe was actually a lawyer on the Kraken case. What are the charges here? What is the story? And who are the folks who have been Charged?
- [33:18]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. So in the wake of the 2020 election, we started to hear about reports that third parties got access to voting machines across the state of Michigan. And the Secretary of State's office referred those reports to the Attorney General's office. And ahead of the 2020 election, the attorney General's office said that in the course of this investigation, we found out that the political opponent running against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nestle was involved in an alleged plot to gain unauthorized access to voting machines. So her office referred the matter to a special prosecutor, asked for a special prosecutor to consider bringing charges. And the result of that is now we have grand jury charges against Matt DiPerno, former Michigan GOP state representative dare Rendon, and Michigan lawyer Stephanie Lambert, who, as you mentioned, was involved in that Sidney Powell lawsuit.
- [34:23]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And so what is it exactly that they're supposed to have done here? Because my understanding is that this has to do with a really long running effort that included a successful effort, Diperno, to actually get a court order to let him look at voting machine information. What did he do that was beyond that? Such that it opened him up to potential criminal liability. According to the special prosecutor. Yeah.
- [34:51]
Clara Hendrickson
So according to the special prosecutor, this group of three folks, DiPerno, Rendon, and Lambert, they seized voting machines across Michigan. And Michigan law, according to the special prosecutor's office, prohibits what's called the undue possession of voting machine. And this is actually really fascinating because before any charges were brought against these individuals, the special prosecutor in this case, who's based In Muskegon County, D.J. hilson, he asked the court to issue a declaratory ruling interpreting Michigan election law about who can access machines and when. And the court ruled that Michigan law prohibits the undue possession, including if that possession is not authorized by the Secretary of State or a court order. So that's what would distinguish access to voting machines here. Because in the case of Antrim County, DePerno did get a court order granting access to the machines. And allegedly that was not the case here. Or there were no court orders giving access to machines. And so the criminal case hinges upon these folks gaining access to machines that they weren't supposed to.
- [36:10]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And what is it that they were trying to do with these machines? Because this is part of a broader effort. Right. We've seen there's some discussion about access to voting information that may have been improper in Georgia's Coffee County, I believe there are other counties around the country. So this is an effort that's not just happening in Michigan. What were these folks trying to accomplish by digging into these machines.
- [36:36]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. So according to Nestle's investigation of these reports of third party access to voting machines, the tabulators were brought back to Oakland county where a team of folks broke into them and tampered with them and performed various tests on them. We've seen some of the affidavits filed in support of that Diperno Antrim county lawsuit. Talk about tests that were performed on the machine. There was a video that was posted, I believe, on Oan with footage of one of the folks accused of performing tests on the machine, sort of doing that with the equipment running the ballots to argue that here's how the machine can be manipulated to count votes incorrectly.
- [37:25]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So you mentioned that Diperno was a political candidate actually running against Nestle. Is there anything else that we should know about him in terms of, you know, where he stands with the Republican Party, what kind of approach to Trump versus anti Trump he took? And what about the other folks who are who have been charged as well? Yeah.
- [37:47]
Clara Hendrickson
So Diperno was endorsed by Trump in 2020 when he was running for Attorney General. And he's probably one of the most prominent Trump allies in Michigan who spread disinformation about voting machines in the 2020 election. And in 2020, he was campaigning alongside Christina Karamo, who was the other Trump endorsed candidate. She was running for Secretary of State to be Michigan's chief elections officer. Another individual who promoted false claims about the 2020 election. And actually at the beginning of the year, the two of them ran against each other in the race to be the chair of the Michigan gop. Karamo ultimately won out, but it was sort of an interesting instance where we're seeing that the fight within the at least the official apparatus of the Michigan GOP isn't necessarily Trump or anti Trump. That's sort of happening broadly among Republicans in Michigan, but there's this conflict within the party, I guess, between different personalities. So that's sort of where things stand now. And he's actually facing a disciplinary action before the Attorney Discipline Board in a separate matter. So sort of facing a number of challenges to, you know, on the criminal side and then even potentially looking at losing his law license.
- [39:19]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And who are the other two people who have been charged alongside him? What's their background?
- [39:24]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah, so former Michigan GOP State Representative Dare Rundon, another Trump ally who promoted false claims of a stolen election when she was in office. She's no longer a state legislator. She was term limited, and she's no longer in office. And then there's Stephanie Lambert and she's an attorney in Michigan that's been really involved in various efforts to undermine the 2020 election. She was involved in that Sidney Powell lawsuit. She toured the state of Michigan encouraging counties to launch forensic audits of the 2020 election. Those were not successful. But she's sort of continued to question the 2020 election and has gone on most recently to argue that the criminal charges that she's facing are an effort to sort of thwart Trump leading into the next presidential election.
- [40:24]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So you mentioned that the special prosecutor in this case took the sort of unusual step of going to a court to kind of get, like, pre cleared essentially for his interpretation of election law, which I think is interesting insofar as it speaks to caution and perhaps acknowledgement that what he's doing here is going to be politically scrutinized pretty closely, both in this case and in the case brought by Nestle. I'm curious if you've seen any other indications of how these two prosecutors are planning to kind of navigate the political scrutiny that they get and the fact that whatever they do, a lot of people are going to accuse them of, like you said, being authoritarians, going after people for political reasons.
- [41:10]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. So one other thing to note in the special prosecutors investigation of the voting machine seizures is that he also convened a grand jury to consider bringing criminal charges, and that's pretty rare in Michigan. So rather than bringing the criminal charges himself, he petitioned to convene a grand jury which actually brought the charges. It's a group of citizens who get advice from the special prosecutor. And so the special prosecutor in that case didn't bring it. And he sort of emphasized when the charges were announced that this was done by an independent group of citizens. That is another part of the process that's sort of come under fire by Stephanie Lambert. But I think it's an interesting note of just how unusual the handling of the investigation has been in that case. Nestle, meanwhile, obviously brought her office, brought the charges, and she sort of acknowledged publicly that she's going to be accused of political interference. That's just sort of where politics stand right now. But she said it would have been malfeasance for her to not act in the face of what she called overwhelming evidence of guilt.
- [42:34]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So I mentioned that this effort was kind of going on in parallel with a number of other efforts to, quote, unquote, audit state election equipment. And in Arizona, people may have heard of the involvement of this company that's called, somewhat amusingly, Cyber Ninjas, that was engaged in a ballot audit in Maricopa county in 2021. Looking at the 2020 election, that was pretty conclusively debunked and has led to a lot of different legal trouble because it turns out that their conclusions were maybe not so reliable when they said that they were looking into fraud. And the cyber ninjas actually show up here in Michigan as well. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [43:18]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah, sure. So when Nestle, her office, initially released the results of its investigation into the voting machine seizures, she identified Doug Logan, who's the CEO of the now shuttered cyber security firm Cyber Ninjas, that was in charge of carrying out the the ballot review in Maricopa county, as one of the computer experts who was involved with testing the machines. The special prosecutor announced that the charges weren't brought against Logan and the other computer experts accused of tampering with the machines because, according to the special prosecutors review, they weren't sort of fully informed of whether or not they actually had legal access to be handling the machines.
- [44:05]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And.
- [44:06]
Clara Hendrickson
But it was interesting to review some text messages that came across my radar earlier this week. We have a paper in Arizona, Gannett has a paper in Arizona Republic, and they've been filing a public records lawsuit to get access to records related to the Arizona audit that uncovered a trove of text messages between Logan and Stephanie Lambert, who, who's charged in the voting machine probe. And reading some of them, it was really interesting and sort of shed light on the coordination and even concerns that some of them had with handling the machines. So in one of them, Lambert texts Logan and she says, we have access to new machines here. And she goes on to write, keep that a secret. And then in a separate exchange, Logan reaches out to Lambert and says that it was his opinion in Michigan that the equipment was put under Lambert's care and that even if he did handle it, it wasn't under his control. And then he basically asks for her input on whether or not that was the right way to sort of frame it. So just sort of like, interesting breadcrumbs here about how some of these actors were connecting in the course of this whole, you know, situation to review voting machines.
- [45:28]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And so just to be clear. So that that suggests that Lambert may have actually had a pretty central role in this, right?
- [45:35]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah. Yeah.
- [45:36]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So what are you expecting as these prosecutions move forward? Are we expecting any additional charges, any other investigations that we know of that are going on?
- [45:48]
Clara Hendrickson
So not expecting additional charges in the voting machine probe because the special procedure prosecutor said that these are all the charges that are going to be brought here. He said that explicitly. And there could be some more charges in the fake electors case because Nestle, when she announced those charges, said that the investigation is still ongoing and didn't rule out bringing charges against potential future defendants.
- [46:15]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
And are there any other aspects of sort of post 2020shenanigans in Michigan that jump out at you as things that prosecutors might potentially want to look into? Or are the fake electors and the election machine tampering sort of the main two things?
- [46:32]
Clara Hendrickson
I think those are the main two things. Three years later, I think we've turned over a lot of stones about how various actors may have tried to meddle in the 2020 election. So I would be surprised to see any other sort of new cases that emerge. I think we're going to see a little bit more of just like pulling on threads of what we already know happened.
- [46:57]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
So I want to close by asking you about something that you wrote recently for the Detroit Free Press, where you said, there's a presidential election next year, but I never stopped covering the last one. And I just wanted to kind of ask what has this been like for you, that this has been a sort of assignment that never stopped, basically. Is there a bit of a Groundhog Day feeling to it?
- [47:21]
Clara Hendrickson
Yeah, a lot of it. I mean, it's in some ways it's been really helpful to have covered. I started the Detroit Free Press in June 2020 and just being able to draw on work that I did from that time. Now, having interviewed a lot of the Republicans who are now facing criminal charges in the fake electors case, it's just been really helpful to sort of have that knowledge and those contexts that have been established. But I'd be lying if I didn't say sometimes it's a little bit exhausting to cover what feels like an interminable election, but also nice every once in a while when I get to turn my attention to other things and covering the state legislature or Michigan's redistricting process. But 2020 is always sort of humming in the background.
- [48:17]
Interviewer (Lawfare Podcast Host)
Let's leave it there. Clara, thank you so much for joining us.
- [48:20]
Clara Hendrickson
Thanks so much for having me.
- [48:25]
Quinta Jurecic
The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare materials supporter through our website, lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other kinds of content available only to our supporters. This podcast is edited by Jen Patya Howell and your audio engineer. This episode was Kara Shillin of Goat Rodeo. Our music is performed by Sophia Yan. As always, thanks for listening.
- [49:14]
Clara Hendrickson
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- [49:25]
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