GRAND RAPIDS, MI – One of the 16 Republicans charged in a 2020 false-elector scheme has filed a federal lawsuit against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel seeking to halt state prosecution.
The defendants are accused of an illegal effort to keep former President Donald Trump in office after he lost the election to President Joe Biden.
Nessel charged the defendants with multiple felonies. She said the defendants knowingly lied on a false document with intent to defraud despite Biden winning Michigan by 154,000 votes.
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Clifford James Frost Jr. on Tuesday, Nov. 21, filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan to stop Nessel’s prosecution. He alleged that Nessel, a Democrat, filed charges to punish or retaliate against the Republican electors.
Attorneys for Frost said he and the other 15 defendant acted only to question the results of Michigan’s presidential election.
“The Michigan Criminal Prosecution represents an attempt to criminalize what was at most a futile political protest,” Frost’s attorneys, Gregory Hanley and Kevin Kijewski, wrote in a 50-page complaint.
The attorneys said Michigan’s 16 presidential electoral votes were cast as expected by the Democratic Party, the political party with the highest number of votes.
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“The AG alleges that the Republican Elector Certificate was submitted to Congress and the National Archives but concedes that Congress only accepted the electoral votes submitted by the Democrat Electors that were certified by the state. Nonetheless, based upon the Republican Elector Certificate, the AG has brought 8 felony counts, all of which require a showing that the Republican Elector Certificate was a ‘forgery,’ and which seek to imprison Plaintiff and the other Republic Electors for up to 14 years,” the lawsuit said.
Related: Michigan GOP, after a pause, excoriates Nessel over Trump elector charges
It said that Nessel “has a big problem, however,” because the alleged forgery did not constitute a crime. The Republican Electors’ Certificate “was exactly what it was purported to be,” the lawsuit said.
The actions of the defendants could not have resulted in the 16 electoral votes being given to the Republican candidate, the attorneys said. The lawsuit said that in an unrelated legal filing, Nessel had cited an MLive article headlined, “Michigan Republicans who cast electoral votes for Trump have no chance of changing Electoral College result.”
“Nonetheless, the AG has claimed that Elector Certification was ‘part of a much bigger conspiracy’ to ‘overthrow the U.S. Government,’” the attorneys wrote.
They asked that the federal court to “preliminarily and permanently enjoin the Michigan Criminal Prosecution because, among other things, it has been brought without a reasonable expectation of obtaining a valid conviction … .”
The state cases are pending in Lansing. Charges include forgery, conspiracy to commit uttering and publishing, and conspiracy to commit election fraud forgery.
Nessel has acknowledged there will be claims the charges were politically motivated but said: “(W)here there is overwhelming evidence of guilt in respect to multiple crimes, the most political act I could engage in as a prosecutor would be to take no action at all.”
The lawsuit has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker in Grand Rapids.
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