A Nevada judge has thrown out the criminal prosecution brought against six alleged “fake electors” who attempted to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential contest.
The decision on Friday is the first time a case pertaining to the Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn election outcomes has been rejected.
The state prosecutors’ case was filed in the incorrect county, according to Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus.
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The six defendants’ attorneys had maintained that Douglas County, where the forgeries were mailed, or Carson City, where they had issued fictitious certificates certifying Trump’s electors, should have been the proper venues for the prosecution.
The Nevada Attorney General’s office sent a statement to The Independent saying, “We disagree with the judge’s decision and will be appealing immediately.”
The accusations were made in conjunction with many state-level criminal prosecutions against Trump supporters who were a part of a national plot to rig the 2020 election by appointing “alternate” electors in states where the president lost.
These “results” would then be confirmed in Congress as a component of a purportedly illegal plan that is at the heart of the accusations of federal and state election meddling against the former president.
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The charges against state party vice chair Jim Hindle III, sitting GOP chair Michael McDonald, chair of Clark County Jesse Law, Jim DeGraffenreid, Shawn Meehan, and Eileen Rice include offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument by submitting fictitious documents to state and federal officials.
A minimum of one year in prison and a maximum of four or five years in prison could result from a conviction on those charges.
Four additional states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, are already pursuing similar prosecutions aimed at “fake electors” and Trump associates involved in the plot.
According to Nevada’s attorney general, special counsel Jack Smith, and the House select committee looking into the events surrounding January 6, each defendant in the case approved of a fraudulent Electoral College vote for Trump in December 2020 despite his loss.
As part of an agreement with Fulton County prosecutors in Georgia’s massive election tampering case, former Trump ally Kenneth Chesebro, who was one of the masterminds behind the abandoned attempt to introduce “alternate” slates of electors, entered a guilty plea.
In an apparent attempt to evade prosecution in the state, Chesebro had consented to meet with investigators in Nevada.
The conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court completely rejected the “alternate elector” proposal last year.