A judge in Nevada on Thursday dismissed for the second time a case involving six defendants who faced charges of illegally claiming they were the state’s electors after President Donald Trump was declared the loser in the 2020 presidential election.
In her ruling, Clark County District Judge Mary Kay Holthus tossed out forgery charges against the six Republican “fake electors,” finding there was not enough evidence that they intended to defraud state officials when they signed a certificate stating Trump had won the state’s six electoral votes. The case is a major victory for Trump allies, as the defendants had long maintained the certificate was not used to intentionally deceive officials into believing it was legitimate.
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“The fact that Defendants openly announced both their actions and their asserted purpose, rather than concealing their conduct or attempting to secretly induce governmental reliance, weighs against a reasonable inference that they acted with fraudulent intent,” she wrote in the ruling.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford plans to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court, setting the stage for another twist in the saga. Holthus had initially tossed the case in June 2024, after determining that the Democratic attorney general filed charges against the six Republicans in a county that lacked jurisdiction over the case. But the issue was revived in her court last year, when the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously overruled her decision to dismiss the case.
The six Republicans pleaded not guilty when they were indicted in 2023 on felony charges, which carried punishments up to a maximum of five years in prison. They included Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, Nevada GOP Vice Chairman Jim Hindle, Republican National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid, then-Clark County GOP Chairman Jesse Law, Shawn Meehan, and Eileen Rice.
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On Thursday, the judge scolded prosecutors, led by Ford, for withholding key exculpatory evidence from the grand jury that brought the charges. Holthus said prosecutors “independently undermine[d] the integrity of the indictment” against the electors by hiding certain evidence. She also determined that the state’s evidence undermined its own arguments by testifying that the certificates could not be processed as genuine electoral documents.
“The purpose of the statute is to prevent public officials from acting upon such documents in the mistaken belief that they are genuine,” she wrote. “Here, the evidence presented to the grand jury demonstrated that the GOP Certificate was not a document that could legally be accepted, filed, registered, or recorded under Nevada or federal law. Nor was there evidence that any public official believed it to be Nevada’s official electoral certificate or was induced to act upon it in the mistaken belief that it was genuine.”
