A former Republican candidate for Michigan attorney general and a onetime state representative have been criminally charged in connection with a scheme to break into voting machine equipment in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, according to court records obtained by The Daily Beast.
Matthew DePerno, endorsed by Donald Trump in an unsuccessful bid for the attorney general’s office last year, was previously named by prosecutors as a “prime instigator” in the plot. He was hit with four charges: two counts of undue possession of a voting machine, one count of conspiracy for undue possession of a voting machine, and one count of conspiracy for unauthorized access. His name is mistakenly spelled “DeParno” in the court docket.
Former state Rep. Daire Rendon was also charged with one count of conspiracy for undue possession of a voting machine and one count of false pretenses.
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The pair, both fierce Trump loyalists, were arraigned via Zoom on Tuesday, according to MLive.com. Both stood mute to the charges against them.
According to an investigation by prosecutors in Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, DePerno “orchestrated a coordinated plan” with several other figures, including Rendon and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, to improperly access voting machines used in the election.
Five voting tabulators were taken to Michigan hotel rooms or Airbnb’s, where people “broke into the tabulators and performed ‘tests’ on the equipment,” according to a petition filed last August by Nessel’s office. DePerno was allegedly present in a hotel room when some of the “tests” took place there.
DePerno denied the allegations at the time, attacking Nessel in a statement that decried her motivations as “unethical” and “purely based on political prosecution.” In a radio interview days later, he called the claims “all nonsense” and promised they would “all be proved false.”
Two days after Nessel’s petition was made public, The Detroit News reported that DePerno had gone on a podcast in 2021 to brag about illegally accessing voting equipment.
“We got access to a tabulator, and we were able to simulate elections. And if I can do it up here in Michigan, with just a couple guys, you don’t think China knows how to do this?” he reportedly said. “You don’t think Russia knows how to do this? You don’t think people in D.C. know how to do it?”
In addition to DePerno and Rendon, seven other suspects were referred by Nessel’s office to special prosecutor D.J. Hilson last fall. Hilson convened a grand jury earlier this year to weigh the possibility of handing down criminal indictments.
In a statement given to the Associated Press on Tuesday, Hilson said that his office had not made any recommendations in the matter, and that “an independent citizens grand jury” had authorized the charges.
Asked by the AP whether a broader investigation remained ongoing, Hilson said, “Still more to come unrelated to the individuals currently charged.”
Besides Sheriff Leaf, others who could face indictments in the plot include Doug Logan, the former chief executive of security firm Cyber Ninjas, and lawyer Stefanie Lambert, a full-throated champion of the election-denial movement.
Lambert said in an appearance on the Conservative Daily podcast last week that she had been indicted by Hilson, but no charges against her were reflected in the docket on Tuesday afternoon.
“I’m not losing any sleep over this,” Lambert said, according to Bridge Michigan. “I know that I’ve done absolutely nothing illegal. My clients have not done anything illegal.”
