Nevada State GOP chairman Michael McDonald introduces former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a Commit to Caucus rally at the Big League Dreams sports park Saturday, Jan. 27, 2024. McDonald and others accused of conspiring to falsely declare Trump the winner of the Nevada presidential election in 2020 will face trial next year, a judge ruled Monday, March 4, 2024.
Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024 | 12:40 p.m.
Attorneys for six Nevada Republicans accused of participating in a scheme that would have falsely given the state’s electoral votes to former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election have filed petitions to move the case out of Clark County and have it dismissed.
In a 91-page court filing, attorney Richard Wright, who is representing Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald and the other five defendants in the case, argues Attorney General Aaron Ford publicly admitted state law does not apply to the conduct central to the case.
Ford told the Nevada Legislature in May that his office spent months investigating the scheme but that he was unable to bring charges then because no state law existed to make such an act illegal.
His testimony was part of a presentation on Senate Bill 133, which sought to establish criminal penalties for anyone taking part in “creating a false slate of electors, serving in a false slate of presidential electors or conspiring to create or serve in a false slate of presidential electors.”
Wright also argues in the court filing that the grand jury was “calculatedly impaneled” in Clark County, even though a Dec. 14, 2020, ceremony to award the votes to Trump was conducted in Carson City.
“Even if the grand jury had jurisdiction, the charges still cannot stand,” the court filing dated Monday states. “The charges are an effort to harshly punish defendants by trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”
A hearing for the petitions was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Feb. 14. The case is being heard by Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus, and a jury trial is scheduled to begin March 11.
Ford’s office declined comment, citing the pending litigation. Wright said, “We look forward to prevailing.”
McDonald was among six Republicans charged by a Clark County grand jury in December with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, category C and D felonies, respectively.
The charges stem from the phony ceremony McDonald and others participated in to allocate Nevada’s electoral college votes to Trump and not President Joe Biden, who won the state by approximately 34,000 votes.
The Nevada Republican Party sent the document — titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Nevada” — to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., with McDonald’s name listed as the return address.
Republicans in a handful of other states went through a similar process. But the meeting of so-called fake electors here and in five other states had no legal standing.
Nevada’s real electors had already certified the state’s election that same day in a remote ceremony, awarding all six of Nevada’s electoral votes to Biden.
At a news conference in the days following the indictment, Ford said the charges were “the culmination of a long and careful investigation into these actions taken in the aftermath of the 2020 election.”
“We’ve been conducting this investigation for years to gather as many facts and as much evidence necessary to pursue justice,” he said at the news conference on Dec. 12.
Along with McDonald, the others indicted are James DeGraffenreid, a Republican national committeeman and district-level delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention; Durward James Hindle III, who is vice chair of the Nevada Republican Committee; Clark County GOP Chairman Jesse Law, who is also running for state assembly; Shawn Meehan, founder of the Guard the Constitution Project: and Eileen Rice, a delegate at the Nevada GOP.
In Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, in July announced 16 people would face eight criminal charges, including forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery, in the fake elector scheme there. The charges come with a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.
Eight fake electors in Georgia accepted plea deals; three others have been charged in the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. An investigation is ongoing in Arizona.
