The Donald Trump administration sent a letter to a clerk in Wayne County requesting ballots, ballot receipts, and ballot envelopes from the 2024 election within 2 weeks. However, Michigan’s AG, Dana Nessel, has ultimately rejected their request. She also made it clear that the state’s leader won’t tolerate any interference in their elections and will defend against the claims made by the president.
Harmeet Dhillon rejects Donald Trump administration’s ballot request
The Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general, Harmeet Dhillon, requested ballot materials from 2024 from a clerk who looks after the elections there. She said in the letter that the prosecutors wanted that information to check if the last presidential election was legally valid.
Nessel stepped in to decline the request, calling the president’s and his allies’ claims of election fraud “baseless.” She also clarified that federal, state, and local officials have discovered no such case of a major fraud case in the state. She revealed that whatever they dealt with after the 2020 elections were very small, fraud-related cases that had already been addressed.
Nessel also took to X (formerly Twitter) to share a statement about the DOJ’s request, which clearly didn’t sit well with her. “Once again, President Trump is weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to sabotage our democratic process and turn it into his own personal agency to interfere in state elections. If this administration wants to bring this circus to our state, my office is prepared to protect the people’s right to vote,” she elaborated.
Furthermore, Dana Nessel also specified that the request to hand over the ballots does not meet the legal standard, as it is based on “speculative evidence of election fraud.”
During his speech at a rally at Saginaw Valley State University a few years back, Trump said that he won Michigan in 2020. He said, “We did great in 2016, and a lot of people don’t know that we did a lot better in 2020. We won. We did win. It was a rigged election.” He had reiterated the claim several times despite it being dismissed by the court and judges.
Originally reported by Shazmeen Navrange on Mandatory.
