During a September fundraiser for his client, an attorney for a defendant in Michigan’s alleged fake elector scheme suggested the case’s co-defendants were imperiling their defense by claiming to have acted on Donald Trump’s orders.
In July, Michigan prosecutors charged 16 Republican activists in the state with eight counts related to forgery and conspiracy. The defendants (one of whom had his charges dismissed in exchange for a cooperation deal in October) are accused of signing documents that falsely represented them as legitimate electors who were handing Michigan’s electoral votes to Trump in 2020, despite Trump losing the state by some 154,000 votes.
Some of those defendants have claimed the Trump campaign was involved in the scheme. That’s a bad idea, suggested Kevin Kijewski, an attorney for one of the alleged plotters, Clifford Frost.
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“I don’t want to call people out by name, but certain de-facto co-defendants, these other people who were charged along with Cliff. There’s a handful of them, where I’m like, what the hell are you doing?” Kijewski told the audience at a September fundraiser for Frost’s defense, in audio reviewed by The Daily Beast. The fundraiser was hosted at the Macomb County Republican Party offices.
“They’re saying (they’ve said this in court documents and other interviews) ‘we were acting at the direction of the president and his lawyers,’” Kijewski went on. “What the hell are you talking about? Really? You got evidence to back that up? Boy, that’s a really stupid thing to say if you don’t. Guess what, they don’t. And if they do, they’ve got something that a whole bunch of other people don’t have.”
Kijewski, who did not return a request for comment, argued to have his client tried separately from the other alleged fake electors. The strategy, as well as Kijewski’s remarks about co-defendants, strikes at a larger rift between defendants and the broader GOP: while some have dismissed the fake elector scheme as the work of legally misguided individuals, others have proudly proclaimed the plot to have been guided by the Trump campaign.
One of the case’s highest-profile defendants, former Michigan Republican Party co-chair Meeshawn Maddock, has previously boasted of close ties with Trumpworld.
“I’m an elector for Donald Trump from the Michigan Republican Party,” Maddock said in a Dec. 2020 interview, days after police stopped the fake electors from entering the state capital with their illegitimate documents. “I along with the other 15 electors were guided by legal minds—attorneys for our president, some very incredible constitutional attorneys—I’ve never in my whole life appreciated legal minds and attorneys before.”
Maddock and the 15 other defendants in her case have pleaded not guilty. In a later event by a conservative Michigan group, reported by CNN, Maddock claimed, “We fought to seat the electors. The Trump campaign asked us to do that.”
Three sources told CNN that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was behind a 2020 effort to promote illegitimate, pro-Trump electors in seven states that had elected Joe Biden. “It was Rudy and these misfit characters who started calling the shots,” a former Trump campaign staffer told CNN. “The campaign was throwing enough shit at the wall to see what would stick.” (A Giuliani spokesperson did not respond for comment.)
In September, another defendant in the Michigan case also claimed to have acted on the direction of Trump and his attorneys.
Amy Facchinello, a school board member who previously came under fire for promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory online, argued in Sept. court filings that she and other defendants were taking orders from Trump.
“Ms. Facchinello and the other Republican Electors in the 2020 election acted at the direction of the incumbent President and other federal officials,” the filing reads. “Attorneys for the President specifically instructed Ms. Facchinello that the Republican electors’ meeting and casting their ballots on December 14, 2020, was consistent with counsels’ advice and was necessary to preserve the presidential election contest.”
“Further,” the filing continued, “an attorney for the President was present at the December 14, 2020, meeting of the presidential electors itself and advised the Presidential Electors, including Ms. Facchinello, that performance of their duties was necessary on behalf of the President and the Constitution.”
At the fundraiser for Frost days after Facchinello’s filing, Kijewski suggested that the argument Facchinello advanced was making the case more difficult for other defendants.
“Those people that have made that assertion, they might have something to worry about from the federal government,” Kijewski said. “And they're really making it really difficult for everyone else. For the most part, they had nothing to do with that. So I don't like people when they bring up the president or the president's lawyers or any of this other stuff, because what they're inevitably going to do, that's like a gift to [Michigan Attorney General] Dana Nessel to try to get those people in.
“I wish they would shut up. That's what I wish they would do.”
