One of the individuals who in Michigan joined as a sham elector supporting Donald Trump despite Joe Biden’s win in the state in the 2020 presidential election has struck what was described as a cooperation deal with state prosecutors in exchange for them dropping all the charges he was facing. The individual, James Renner, was noted in the Associated Press to be 77 years old.
All the 16 individuals who joined as claimed members of the electoral college from Michigan supporting Trump in 2020 were later hit with criminal charges.
Also in Michigan, several pro-Trump individuals including the former president’s pick for state attorney general in the 2022 elections were criminally charged in tandem with a post-2020 election plot that saw the covert assembling of machines used for vote tabulation in hopes of taking data that would support the claims from Trump’s circles of fraud. Having assembled pieces of that equipment in a hotel room after which ill-defined tests were conducted certainly makes the incident among the more extreme from the months after Trump lost.
Meanwhile, another of the state-level criminal cases connected to all these developments saw significant progress this week after Sidney Powell, a defendant in Georgia, agreed to a plea deal that also set her up to later provide testimony in future proceedings, which in theory could include the lawyer testifying against Trump himself, who’s also charged. Powell will not be facing time in jail if her agreement holds, having been instead left with six years of probation and financial penalties, among other consequences. She’d been set to face trial within days and had just lost in some last-ditch attempts to boot her case.
And at the federal level, Trump is now seeking to challenge the gag order from the presiding judge in his criminal case from federal authorities that also alleges attempted election interference. The restrictions, as they stand, block public attacks on Special Counsel Jack Smith, Smith’s staff, witnesses, and others.
