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Mike Rogers

Michigan GOP Senate Candidate Exposed -- As Resident Of Florida

Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) is running in the Republican US Senate primary on his longtime relationship with the Mitten State and his local roots. But a staffer for his Democratic rival just unearthed evidence showing his ties to a state decidedly much further away from his target constituency.

In a Monday tweet, Rogers — who represented Michigan's Eighth Congressional District between 2001 and 2015 — wrote, "I'm proud to be born and raised right here in Michigan. And I will be proud to serve my home in the US Senate." This prompted Austin Cook, the communications director for Democratic US Senate candidate Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), to tweet a screenshot of Rogers' voter registration record that shows a Florida ZIP code and a voter status of "active."

"Fun fact: @MikeRogersForMI is literally registered to vote in Florida right now," Cook wrote, tagging Rogers' official campaign account.

According to Newsweek, Rogers is currently living at his sister-in-law's home in Brighton, Michigan while a home he bought in West Lake Township is undergoing renovations. Michigan Advance reported that Rogers' official residence was a home in Cape Coral, Florida prior to him announcing his candidacy for the US Senate.

The Constitution dictates that in order to run for US Senate, a candidate must be a US citizen for at least nine years, be at least 30 years old, and be a legal resident of the state they seek to represent at the time of election. This means that even as a current Florida resident, Rogers could still represent Michigan in the US Senate if his residency in the Mitten State is established prior to the first Tuesday in November. Being a registered voter at his West Lake Township home would ostensibly meet the Constitution's residency requirements.

However, proving his authentic status as a Michigander may be more difficult to do between now and the time voters cast their ballots if Rogers was indeed a full-time Florida resident until recently. A 4,751 square-foot five-bedroom, four-bathroom house in Cape Coral valued on Zillow at nearly $1.7 million matches the address shown on Rogers' voter registration in Florida. And according to Lee County, Florida property assessment records, that home is in the name of Rogers, his wife, and their family trust. Rogers has not yet publicly clarified whether he is still a full-time Florida resident, which is required to be an actively registered voter in the Sunshine State.

Determining whether Rogers claimed the Cape Coral home as his primary residence could be confirmed by flood insurance claim records. Cape Coral was in the direct path of Hurricane Ian in 2022, which was Florida's most costly storm in history. Ian was also the third-costliest storm in US history according to the National Hurricane Center, causing more than 150 direct and indirect deaths and more than $112 billion in total property damage.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which is the federal program that underwrites all flood insurance claims in the US, pays replacement cash value (RCV) in claims where the affected property is the insured's principal residence. In cases where a home is a secondary residence, the NFIP instead pays actual cash value (ACV), which is a lesser amount. If Rogers qualified for an RCV claim, that would mean he told the federal government that the Cape Coral house was his principal residence at the time of the flood.

AlterNet has reached out to the Rogers campaign via email to see if his Cape Coral home was damaged by Hurricane Ian, and if it was, if the adjuster assigned to his claim recommended an ACV or RCV payment. This article will be updated in the event Rogers' campaign responds.

Rogers has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump in the Michigan US Senate Republican primary. He's running against Peter Meijer, a scion of the wealthy Meijer family known for their nationwide grocery store chain. Meijer notably voted to impeach Trump following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, though he has since softened his tone in regard to the former president.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Kenneth Chesebro

Leaked Testimony Shows How Fake Electors Plot Led To Insurrection

CNN has obtained audio of attorney Kenneth Chesebro talking with Michigan state prosecutors about Donald Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In that recording, Chesebro explains how what he now calls “a photo-op … gone south” spun out the false electors scheme and reenergized Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election. All with a big assist from an attorney named … Kenneth Chesebro.

According to Chesebro’s testimony, a meeting took place at the White House on December 16, 2020, in which several attorneys who had worked for Trump’s campaign at the state level came in to tell him the jig was up. “We had been told before the meeting not to say anything that would make [Trump] feel better about his chances than before the meeting had started,” Chesebro said.

Only Chesebro didn’t follow that advice. Other attorneys delivered bad news to Trump, including Chesebro’s friend and fellow attorney Jim Troupis, who reportedly told Trump things were “over” in Wisconsin. But when it was Chesebro’s turn to speak, he delivered a different message.

“I ended up explaining that Arizona was still hypothetically possible because the alternate electors had voted,” said the former Trump attorney. “And I explained the whole logic. I basically summarized a lot of the Nov. 18 memo, and I explained that Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsberg and Professor Lawrence Tribe had both written that Jan. 6 was the real deadline. So, because the alternate electors had voted, we had more time to win litigation.”

It’s not often someone goes on record to explain how their actions helped give rise to an insurgency, but that’s exactly what Chesebro seemed to describe.

The statement about Arizona’s alternate electors was like a bomb tossed into the meeting. According to CNN, Chesebro’s “optimistic comments” gave Trump renewed hope that his attempts to overturn the election were not finished. Former Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, who was also present, was reportedly “concerned.”

“Right after the meeting,” Chesebro says in the recordings, “Troupis said that Reince Priebus was extremely concerned with what I told the president about Arizona, and about the real deadline being January 6. And he was going to do damage control. Reince was going to follow up and was trying to mitigate whatever optimism I guess I created.” Trump apparently paid no more attention to Priebus at that meeting than when he served as Trump’s first chief of staff. But it certainly would be interesting to interview Priebus about his thoughts on the fateful December 16 confab.

That Chesebro was eager to talk about false electors isn’t a surprise. He authored a sweeping memo on Dec. 6, 2020, in which he described the majority of the scheme. Right up until January 6, Chesebro was shoving the scheme along at every step, emailing party chairs, working with Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, and pulling out all the stops to create an alternative reality in which neither the Constitution nor the Electoral Count Act really matters.

According to the racketeering indictment filed in Fulton County, Georgia, Chesebro helped coordinate the selection of false electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That included not just sending letters and emails to Trump campaign staffers and Republican Party officials, but even coming up with the wording on the fake certificates that false electors would sign. In the case of Arizona, Georgia, and New Mexico, Chesebro appears to have created the fake certificates himself.

Chesebro went on to craft a memo for Giuliani and another for John Eastman explaining “multiple strategies for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.” In the final draft of one of these delay-and-disrupt memos, Chesebro declared that any of his strategies would be “preferable to allowing the Electoral Count Act to operate by its terms.”

That memo goes on to speculate about what might happen after Republicans overturned the election on January 6 and handed the White House back to Trump. The situation, Chesebro says, would be “messy” and the Supreme Court might try to intrude, but none of that mattered. What mattered was making sure Joe Biden and Kamala Harris never took office.

In short, no one is in this thing deeper than Chesebro. No one did more to keep the conspiracy going, even when others on Trump’s team were ready to throw in the towel. And no one, but no one, should be happier about prosecuting attorneys being willing to strike a deal than Kenneth John Chesebro.

Chesebro already pleaded guilty in the Georgia case to a single felony charge of attempting to file false documents. For this, he got five years probation, paid a $5,000 fine, and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. That’s not a bad deal for someone who was facing seven felony counts and whose name appeared in 35 acts allegedly supporting the criminal conspiracy at the heart of the racketeering indictment.

Chesebro is clearly cooperating with investigators in Wisconsin, as well as Arizona and Nevada, though the full extent of any deal he made in those states is not known. CNN has also identified Chesebro as an unindicted co-conspirator in Trump’s federal trial for election interference, which suggests he may also be cooperating with special counsel Jack Smith.

On the one hand, this is all great because no one knows more about the scheme to disrupt the Jan. 6 vote count than Chesebro. However, no one did more to create and encourage that scheme. If Chesebro’s testimony helps convict Trump, then it was worth it. If there’s any other result, it was not.

Anyway, Chesebro seems willing to spill the beans about anything in exchange for staying outside of a prison cell. In the recording of his meeting with Michigan prosecutors, he said, “There was a subsequent email a week later, where Troupis said that it’s extremely important that no one ever learn what happened in the meeting. And I don’t actually know, but it was probably related to what I told the president about the real deadline and about Arizona. So there was something very sensitive about what happened in the meeting that there was concern about, that had to be kept quiet.”

Four indictments later, we know what the concern was about.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Matt Hall

Michigan GOP Politician Sent Death Threats As A Student

The Michigan legislature is currently considering bills designed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals. Records provided to the American Independent Foundation show that one of the leading opponents of gun safety legislation in the Michigan House has a history of threatening others with gun violence.

House Minority Leader Matt Hall, a Republican who represents a southwest Michigan district around Kalamazoo, is a graduate of Western Michigan University. During his time there, according to police records obtained through a public records request, he admitted to sending death threats to a student at a college in Maryland, where his girlfriend was studying.

In a signed statement, Hall wrote:

“On December 3, 2001 I sent two separate e-mails to [redacted] at Washington College. The e-mails were threatening to kill him. I thought he had sent me threatening instant messages, but discovered he didn’t.”

In one email, Hall wrote:

YOU BETTER NOT GO TO THE CHRISTMAS PARTY TOMORROW NIGHT! JUST A WORD OF ADVICE!! THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN AND WE DON’T LIKE YOUR KIND TREATING LADIES LIKE [redacted] WITHOUT DIGNITY. SHE IS A FINE LADY YOU DON’T NEED TO BE SAYING SHIT ABOUT HER! WE ARE GOING TO IMPOSE OUR SOUTHERN WAYS ON YOU! I’VE GOT A SHOTGUN RIFLE AND I JUST PUT A BULLET IN IT WITH YOUR NAME ON IT!

In another, he told the student: “YOU HAD BETTER WATCH OUT!! WE DON’T LIKE YOUR KIND HERE IN WC! YOU WON’T FEEL VERY CROMBIE WHEN WE ARE DONE WITH YOU! BY YOU BLOCKING US ON IM WE ARE JUST MORE ANGRY!!! CLOSING TIME IS COMING SOON! BETTER SAY YOUR PRAYERS!!! STAY AWAY FROM [redacted]”

In his statement to the police, Hall wrote: “I don’t have a shotgun or have a bullet with his name on it. I wasn’t going to harm him. I had no intention to hurt him. I realize it was unacceptable and inappropriate. I am sorry for causing him stress. I will not threaten anyone else.”

The file indicates that the case was sent to the Western Michigan University Office of Student Judicial Affairs to be handled within the university. It does not indicate how or whether Hall was punished, but his campaign bio notes that he graduated from Western Michigan University and its affiliated law school.

Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the American Independent Foundation.

In the aftermath of a mass shooting in February at Michigan State University that left three students dead and more injured, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Democratic-led Michigan Legislature enacted a series of bills to combat gun violence.

These included stronger background checks, safe storage requirements, and extreme risk protection orders, commonly known as red flag laws, to temporarily disarm those judged to be a danger to themselves or others.

Bills that would prevent anyone convicted of domestic abuse from owning or possessing firearms and ammunition for eight years after completing their sentences are working their way through the Legislature.

“This is about preventing domestic violence survivors from experiencing further domestic violence and making sure people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence can’t have a gun for a period of years,” Democratic Sen. Stephanie Chang, who sponsored the proposals, told the Michigan Advance in July.

The Republican minority has opposed these gun safety efforts. In an Aug. 9 press release, since deleted from the Michigan House Republicans’ website, Hall framed himself as “a Leading Defender of our Second Amendment Rights”:

It’s no secret that many left-wing activists are pushing radical infringements on constitutional freedoms. You may have heard of extreme ideas such as banning so-called “assault weapons” or holding local gun shops liable if someone else commits a crime. I’ll always stand against these radical proposals to interfere with your right to bear arms, and if Democrats bring up any of them for a vote in the Michigan House of Representatives, I will proudly vote “NO.”

Earlier this year, I voted “NO” on “red flag” laws — which would take away law-abiding Michiganders’ constitutionally protected firearms and their ability to defend themselves, while violating citizens’ right to a fair legal process. I also voted “NO” on burdensome mandates requiring universal background checks and registration for private gun sales.

In a post in March 2022, Hall touted legislation to lower the penalties for those carrying concealed pistols with expired licenses.

Ryan Bates, the executive director of End Gun Violence Michigan, said in a statement: “This year, the legislature has made historic progress on gun safety measures. It’s concerning to learn that a legislative leader who opposed some of those initiatives has made violent threats in the past. Now is the time when all our leaders in Lansing need to unite around protecting our communities from gun violence.”

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.