(Headline USA) A special prosecutor in Michigan has been appointed to investigate whether the Republican candidate for attorney general and others should be criminally charged for their attempts to gain access to voting machines after the 2020 election.
The office of Democratic attorney general Dana Nessel last month asked the Prosecuting Attorneys Coordinating Council, a state agency, to consider charges against nine people, including Republican Matthew DePerno, her opponent in the November election.
The executive director of the council on Thursday said D.J. Hilson, the prosecuting attorney in Muskegon County, would handle the case. Hilson, a Democrat, was first elected to office in 2012.
Nessel’s office cited a potential conflict of interest because of the upcoming election. But the decision to press the spurious lawfare attack raises its own set of questions, regardless of whether Nessel will exercise direct oversite or simply pressure others to exert undue influence on the upcoming election.
Nessel—a George Soros-backed lesbian with a drinking problem—has faced numerous controversies during her term in office—not the least of which was her role in undermining Michigan’s election laws in 2020, helping to spur a lawsuit in Antrim County, where voting irregularities in a local election raised red flags about the presidential results.
DePerno represented the plaintiff, who called for a complete forensic audit in the county.
Cease and Desist served on Election Source.
This should be the job of Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general.
I guess I'll start doing her job now. Why wait for November 2022. pic.twitter.com/4Ghv13Q26t
— Matthew S. DePerno, Esq. (@mdeperno) July 14, 2021
A phone call to DePerno’s campaign manager seeking comment was not immediately returned. He has previously said the claims were “purely based on political prosecution.”
The Kalamazoo attorney also said that “90% of the facts that [Nessel] lays out, that she calls facts in her petition, are either false or I have no knowledge of what she’s talking about.”
The case against DePerno is part of a nationwide left-wing effort to punish and invalidate those who exercised their legal and constitutional rights to press election challenges over the widespread irregulatities.
A Colorado county clerk this week pleaded not guilty to charges she allowed an unauthorized person to break into her county’s election system in search of additional evidence.
Trump lost the election in Michigan by some 154,000 votes, an outcome that has been upheld by multiple investigations, including one by the GOP-led state Senate.
DePerno won state party members’ nomination for attorney general over a former Michigan House speaker who narrowly lost to Nessel in 2018.
Allegations made public last month named DePerno as one of the “prime instigators” of a plan to get improper access to voting machines and use them to dispute the 2020 presidential outcome.
According to documents released by Nessel’s office, five vote tabulators were taken from Roscommon and Missaukee counties in northern Michigan, and Barry County in western Michigan. Investigators found others in the group broke into the tabulators and performed “tests” on the equipment.
“It was determined during the investigation that DePerno was present at a hotel room during such ‘testing,’” a petition to the prosecutors’ council said.
Obtaining undue possession of a voting machine used in an election is a felony punishable by five years in prison.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
