Michigan's attorney general agreed to investigate individuals who might have personally profited off election fraud claims, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday.
The Republican-led state Senate Oversight Committee recommended an investigation as part of its recent report examining and refuting allegations of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election, the Examiner reported.
A spokeswoman for Democrat state Attorney General Dana Nessel told the Examiner in a statement that Michigan State Police will help in the probe.
"After reviewing the report in full, the department has accepted Sen. [Ed] McBroom and the committee’s request to investigate," Nessel press secretary Lynsey Mukomel said.
Despite allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 elections, the committee issued a 55-page report that found election results were accurate.
President Joe Biden won Michigan and its 16 Electoral College votes by roughly 150,000 ballots.
"After innumerable hours over many months, watching, listening, and reading both in-person testimony and various other accounts, I am confident in asserting that the results of the November 2020 General Election in Michigan were accurately represented by the certified and audited results," McBroom, the Republican chairman of the oversight committee, said in a statement when the report was released last month.
The Senate committee found only two instances of dead people voting – one being a clerical issue and the other a "timing issue."
"None of these constituted fraudulent election activities or manipulations," the report said.
As for results in Antrim County, where attorney Matthew DePerno and other critics argued the hacking of voting machines led to Trump's defeat in the county, the report said DePerno's arguments were "demonstrably false and based on misleading information and illogical conclusions."
"The Committee finds those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility," the report said.
The report suggested the attorney general consider investigating "those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends."
The Epoch Times reported DePerno and his client, William Bailey, have raised money for a case brought against the county that alleged voting machines used in the county "were shown to miscount votes." The case was dismissed in mid-May.
Patrick Colbeck, a former Michigan senator, has a website with content he says backs election fraud claims. Users must pay a monthly fee to see some of the content, the Times said.
Colbeck recently started a petition to censure McBroom and the other Republican senators who signed onto the report and denounced what he described as legislators’ "attempt to marginalize those exposing election fraud," according to the Times.
On his website, Colbeck said the committee's report "consistently repeats the flawed assertion that the integrity of the election can be demonstrated simply by running ballots through the tabulator."
"The Committee appears to be operating under an extremely unique definition of 'election fraud' that dismissed any evidence of fraud if it did not add up to the 154,188 votes promoted as the margin of victory for Joe Biden," Colbeck said, according to the Times.
"This failure of reasoning dismisses the cumulative effect of breaches in the chain of custody and violations of existing statute."
The Examiner reported Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, D, said her office looked forward to working with Nessel to probe what she called "the real fraud that took place in 2020: efforts to deceive Michigan citizens about their vote with misleading, false statements about the accuracy & integrity of our elections."
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