One of the stranger heat-fever dream scenarios of the 2020 presidential election happened in Michigan, where MAGA Republicans became completely convinced that vote tabulators had somehow been compromised, resulting in votes for Trump being counted for Biden. The insanity was already in full swing a month after the election in December when the shenanigans began in Antrim County.
A security group that’s questioned Michigan’s presidential results and is listed in at least one of the lawsuits challenging Michigan’s election results is reviewing tabulators and other election materials in Antrim County.
Allied Securities Operation Group and Village of Central Lake resident William Bailey will take forensic images of the county’s 22 tabulators and review other election related material Sunday following a Friday court order allowing for the review.
Antrim County Administrator Pete Garwood and county Clerk Sheryl Guy will be in attendance, according to a statement from the county.
It began when Antrim County initially posted inaccurate unofficial numbers from election night which it then had to correct. The initial error, which was caused by a failure to upload a software update, had been obvious since Antrim County is a very conservative area and the results showed Democrats up and down the ballot winning in a landslide. The corrected numbers were confirmed by hand count, no harm, no foul, but the seeds of a conspiracy were born.
As seen above, allies of Trump were allowed to investigate. They quickly produced a dishonest report claiming that the Dominion machines were intentionally designed to facilitate fraud. Central to the issuance of that report was a lawyer named Matt DePerno who would later be the Republican Party’s losing candidate for attorney general in the 2022 election. He asked Trump to take some action, and the then-president briefly considered issuing an executive order for the military to seize voting tabulators throughout the country. The order was drafted but never signed.
At the request of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel, a more thorough and professional investigation into the Antrim glitch was conducted by J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor, and if you’re interested in all the details of his findings, you can watch the following video.
But DeParno wasn’t done. He sought out access to tabulators in other counties, but this time without the cover of a court order. As you might guess, that is a crime in Michigan. Yet, by the time that crime was understood, DeParno was already a candidate for attorney general. This meant that incumbent AG Nessel had a conflict of interest, so she asked for and obtained a special prosecutor to investigate DeParno and his coconspirators. One of those coconspirators, Detroit lawyer Stefanie Lambert, just revealed that she’s been indicted by a grand jury.
“My attorney has been informed that I have been indicted by DJ Hilson, the special prosecutor in Michigan, working at the request of (Attorney General) Dana Nessel,” Stefanie Lambert said Wednesday on a conservative podcast, where she bashed the pending criminal action.
“I’m not losing any sleep over this,” continued Lambert, a metro Detroit attorney who has worked for 2020 election deniers across the country. “I know that I’ve done absolutely nothing illegal. My clients have not done anything illegal.”
…In her Wednesday podcast appearance, Lambert lambasted Hilson for using the grand jury to issue indictments instead of making a charging decision by himself. She reiterated a previous threat to sue him.
She sounds unremorseful and a bit unhinged. Still, she’s a bit player in this drama. The other conspirators include, in addition to DeParno, former state Rep. Daire Rendon of Lake City, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, and officials with the Cyber Ninjas security firm, including CEO Doug Logan. It seems likely that some or all of them have also been indicted.
Here I need to remind you of a pattern that is very common. These MAGA Republicans wound up doing exactly what they falsely accused the Democrats of doing, which is illegally tampering with vote tabulating machines. The didn’t believe in the integrity of our elections, but all they succeeded in doing is convincing countless others to lose faith in the integrity of our elections. They found no evidence of fraud whatsoever. And now they’re probably going to jail.
This is what happens when you take action on behalf of Donald Trump. You go to jail like Michael Cohen, Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg and about 300 (so far) of the January 6 rioters. In the past, maybe you got a pardon like Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, but that’s over now.
The false reality he creates is infectious and it’s criminal in nature. There can be no justice while he walks free.
We have so few national political reporters who’ve ever covered a county courthouse for any length of time that very little of this comes across to the public. I keep going back to my (beloved, out of print) copy of Jimmy Breslin’s Watergate book, “How the Good Guys Finally Won”. Because Breslin had spent decades hanging around the Queens County Courthouse (and the associated fixers, pols, wise guys, cops, lawyers, judges, and hangers-on*), he was able to see Watergate for what it was. Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election is, basically, a super-sized version of what Nixon did in office. Here’s an example of how it happened back then: https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/how-the-good-guys-finally-won-playing-cards/
*Often one guy would be in multiple categories.
Good. I hope they rot in jail for all of eternity. Don’t sound bitter do l? I am so sick and tired of these fucking assholes. I’ll tell you Martin, it’s hard not to fall into a state of hate about all of this insane nonsense. I really hope I can keep being not being them.
Every accusation is a confession, ad nauseam.
Get ready for a truly weaponized Department of Justice in 2025 or 2029 or 2033…or whenever the Democrats lose the White House.
I hope someone’s working on a book (or at least, a long essay) about folks like these. In particular, the fact that they (and the other insurrectionists) are disproportionately middle-income (and higher) and middle-aged (and older). Meaning, they have something, lots of things, to lose: jobs, homes with mortgages, longstanding identities in their communities as respected and law-abiding citizens, etc. These are not, by and large, young, rootless activists (e.g., ’60s anti-war protesters) for whom going to jail for, say, 6 months, is more in the nature of an inconvenience (and possibly a badge of honor).