Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel suggested on Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s election fraud lawsuits are racist because they insinuate that “black people are corrupt.”
“Really the themes that we see, that persist, are this: Black people are corrupt, Black people are incompetent and Black people can’t be trusted. That’s the narrative that is continually espoused by the Trump campaign and their allies in these lawsuits,” Nessel said during a press call, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Nessel cited two of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits, which allege ballot-counting issues and fraud in Detroit, a traditionally Democratic city with a high black population.
Trump targeted this district but ignored majority-white counties such as Oakland and Kent that also voted for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, she said.
The Trump campaign’s lawsuits are “demonstrably false,” Nessel added, arguing that there is no evidence to support claims of election tampering.
If she were to file similar suits that were “this baseless and this frivolous,” she hypothesized, without citing examples, “I would be sanctioned and I would likely be looking at a loss of licensure.”
Trump’s team filed another lawsuit in federal court in the Western District in Michigan on Wednesday, alleging that there was enough wrongdoing involved in counting votes in Detroit that a judge should temporarily prevent the certification of election results not just in Detroit, but across the state.
As evidence, the Trump campaign submitted more than 100 affidavits from witnesses who said they observed wrongdoing.
One of these affidavits is from a woman named Anita Chase, who said she reviewed state records showing her deceased son had cast ballots in 2016 and 2020.
A spokesman for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson claimed Chase’s affidavit was a case of mistaken identity.
The other affidavits allege that observers were unable to get close enough to watch votes being tabulated in Detroit, and claim Republican observers were improperly harassed.
