A Clark County judge has dismissed the charges filed against the six Nevada Republicans who submitted an invalid slate of electoral votes for former President Donald Trump in 2020 on the grounds that the county was not the appropriate jurisdiction for the case.
At a Friday morning hearing in Clark County District Court, Judge Mary Kay Holthus said she was unconvinced by state prosecutors’ arguments that Clark County was the appropriate county to hear the case. The electors’ attorneys had argued a more appropriate venue would be in Carson City, where the false signing ceremony took place, or in Douglas County, where the fake elector documents were originally mailed from.
Clark County is more Democratic, meaning a jury could be less favorable to the Republican defendants.
“You have literally, in my opinion, a crime that has occurred in another jurisdiction,” Holthus said. “It’s so appropriately up north and so appropriately not here.”
Immediately after the ruling, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said the “judge got it wrong” and that his office will appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.
The state is unable to re-file the case up north because a three-year statute of limitations expired in December.
Maggie McLetchie, a lawyer for one of the defendants, said of the state: “They’re done.”
The ruling marks the first time that a case related to the Trump campaign’s efforts to submit a false slate of electors has been dismissed. Similar prosecutions are taking place in four other swing states — Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin — involved in the Trump campaign’s effort to submit a false slate of electors after he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
The six defendants — Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, Republican National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid, Clark County GOP Chairman Jesse Law, state party Vice Chair Jim Hindle, Shawn Meehan and Eileen Rice — were each indicted on two counts by a grand jury in December over their role in submitting fake election documents to federal and state election authorities that purported to cast Nevada’s six electoral votes for Trump.
Lawyers with the Nevada Attorney General’s Office had filed the charges in Clark County and argued that it was an appropriate venue for the case. Two defendants conspired and drafted key documents while they were still in Clark County, they alleged, and fraudulent electoral documents were mailed to a federal judge in Las Vegas.
Attorney Richard Wright, who is representing McDonald, said the motion to dismiss the case was supported by a 2021 Nevada Supreme Court ruling involving murders committed in Washoe and Douglas counties. The high court ruled at the time that if a location was only involved in preparatory acts and the formation of intent, it is an insufficient venue for a trial.
In addition, Wright argued that the fraudulent documents were erroneously sent to Miranda Du, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Nevada, in Las Vegas despite Du being based in Reno, according to testimony from the court clerk, which Wright said was withheld from the grand jury.
“It temporarily made a pit stop in Las Vegas,” Wright said.
Meanwhile, Matthew Rashbrook, a lawyer with the attorney general’s office, argued that there is no single county that could have complete jurisdiction over the case, to which Holthus responded by saying she disagreed with “100 percent.”
Updated on 6/21/24 at 12:05 p.m. to correct that Ford said the judge got the decision wrong.
