State AG vows to appeal.
ALas Vegas judge who made national headlines earlier this year when a felon apparently flung himself at her during a sentencing hearing has now made national headlines once again, this time for dismissing a case against alternate electors who proclaimed former President Donald Trump the winner of Nevada in the 2020 presidential election.
Last December, a grand jury indicted six Nevada Republicans — GOP state Chairman Michael McDonald, RNC member Jim DeGraffenreid, Clark County GOP Chairman Jesse Law, national and Douglas County committee member Shawn Meehan, Storey County clerk Jim Hindle, and state party member Eileen Rice of the Lake Tahoe area — for filing and uttering a forged instrument after they allegedly cast alternate elector votes declaring that Trump had won Nevada in 2020, not Joe Biden. Similar cases have also sprung up in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
‘I don’t see any way I have jurisdiction over this case.’
The state capital, Carson City, is located in Northern Nevada, and most of the defendants live in rural areas of the state, which largely vote Republican.
Nevertheless, Democrat state Attorney General Aaron Ford attempted to try the case in Clark County, which leans heavily Democratic. Fellow prosecutor Matthew Rashbrook, who works in Ford’s office, argued that the entire state was victimized by the alleged actions of the so-called “fake electors.”
“No one county contains the entirety of these crimes,” he said.
Defense attorneys countered that the defendants apparently cast their 2020 electoral votes for Trump in Carson City and that much of their documentation allegedly originated in rural Douglas County. They also accused Ford of bringing the case to Clark County in hopes of finding a friendlier jury pool.
On Friday, Judge Mary Kay Holthus sided with the defense. “You have literally, in my opinion, a crime that has occurred in another jurisdiction,” she said. “It’s so appropriately up north and so appropriately not here.”
“I don’t see any way I have jurisdiction over this case.”
She dismissed it on technical jurisdictional grounds, not on the merits. Worst case scenario it’ll go to a different jurisdiction with closer nexus to the crimes.