Judge dismisses charges in Nevada fake voter case over location issue, attorney general will appeal

LAS VEGAS – A judge in Las Vegas dismissed an indictment Friday against six Republicans accused of presenting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 state presidential election, potentially removing Nevada among four states with pending criminal charges against so-called fake voters.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford stood for a moment after Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus ruled that Las Vegas was the wrong location for the case and said she would take the case to the Supreme Court. of State.

“The judge got it wrong and we will appeal immediately,” Ford, a Democrat, told reporters afterward. He declined further comment.

Defense attorneys bluntly declared the case closed, saying that presenting it now to another grand jury in another location, such as Carson City, Nevada’s capital, would violate a three-year statute of limitations that expired last December.

“They’re done,” said Margaret McLetchie, attorney for Clark County Republican Party Chairman Jesse Law, one of the defendants in the case.

The judge canceled the trial, which had been scheduled for January, for defendants who also included state Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald; party national committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid; Douglas County and National Committeeman Shawn Meehan; Storey County Clerk Jim Hindle; and Lake Tahoe area party member Eileen Rice. Each was charged with offering a false instrument to file and uttering a forged instrument – ​​crimes that carry a penalty of up to four or five years in prison.

Defense attorneys led by McDonald’s lawyer Richard Wright argued that Ford improperly presented the case before a grand jury in Las Vegas – Nevada’s largest and most Democratic-leaning city – rather than the northern cities of Carson City or Reno. of Nevada in a more Republican region where the alleged crimes occurred. They also accused prosecutors of failing to present evidence to the grand jury that would have exonerated their clients, who, according to them, had no intention of committing a crime.

“Crimes are tried and the crime scene is the place where the crime was committed,” Wright told the judge on Friday. “The signing of the document took place in Carson City.”

Challenged by Judge Holthus to respond, Deputy State Attorney General Matthew Rashbrook argued that “no county contains the entirety of these crimes.”

“Society is the victim of these crimes,” said the prosecutor. “Voters who would have been disenfranchised by these acts… would have been victims of these crimes.”

But the judge ruled that although McDonald and Law live in Las Vegas, “it all happened up north.”

After the hearing, Hindle’s attorney, Brian Hardy, declined to comment on calls from advocacy groups for his client to resign from his elected position as supervisor of elections in Story County, a jurisdiction with just over 4,100 residents. . Those calls included a news conference Friday outside the courthouse with leaders of three organizations.

Meehan is the only defendant not named by the state party as Nevada’s delegate to the 2024 Republican National Convention next month in Milwaukee. His defense lawyer, Sigal Chattah, said his client chose not to seek the position. Chattah ran as a Republican in 2022 for state attorney general and lost to Ford by just under 8% of the vote.

Nevada is one of seven presidential battleground states where fake voter lists falsely certified that Trump had won in 2020, not Democrat Joe Biden. Others are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Nevada case, filed last December, focused on the actions of six defendants. Criminal cases in three other states are concentrated in many more – 16 in Michigan19 in. Georgia and 18 in Arizona.

Trump lost Nevada in 2020 by more than 30,000 votes for Biden and the state’s Democratic electors certified the results in the presence of Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican. His defense of the results as reliable and accurate led the state Republican Party to censor herbut Cegavske later conducted an investigation that found no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state.