Michigan mentioned in Georgia grand jury's Trump indictment

Michigan features prominently in a Georgia grand jury's indictment of former President Donald Trump and his allies in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.

The indictment, released Monday, references lies about the administration of Michigan's election in the last presidential race, an effort to convince Michigan lawmakers to interfere in the election and the apparent involvement of prominent pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell in an examination of voting equipment in a Michigan county targeted by election conspiracists in the wake of 2020.

Here's a look at the role Michigan plays in the conspiracy charges brought against Trump and 18 others after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis launched her probe of the former president and his effort to fight his loss in 2020.

The Donald Trump Georgia indictment: Everything you need to know in one place

Michigan election lies referenced

The indictment references several false claims made by Trump and others. It states that Trump made false claims about fraud in the 2020 election during his meeting at the White House in November 2020 with Michigan's then-Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, and the state's then-House Speaker Lee Chatfield, R-Levering.

The indictment also mentions the state House Oversight Committee hearing in early December 2020, when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis urged lawmakers to try to award Michigan's Electoral College votes to Trump despite his loss in the state. At that hearing, the pair of lawyers "solicited, requested, and importuned the Michigan legislators present at the meeting to unlawfully appoint presidential electors from Michigan" while Giuliani made false statements alleging fraud in the state's 2020 election, the indictment states.

Giuliani went on to lie about Michigan's election when he spoke to the Georgia Senate's Judiciary Subcommittee, falsely claiming that voting equipment used in Antrim County switched votes for Trump to Joe Biden, the indictment notes — Trump won Antrim County. In a subsequent hearing before the Georgia House's Government Affairs Committee, the indictment mentions a false claim from Giuliani that in Michigan, there were hundreds of thousands more ballots counted in the 2020 election than provided to voters.

The next month, Trump lied about dead people voting in Michigan and Detroit's turnout rate in a phone call to pressure Georgia's secretary of state to find the votes he needed to win the state.

The false claims from Trump and his allies furthered the conspiracy to unlawfully overturn the election, the indictment alleges.

Powell's alleged involvement in Michigan voting machine review

The indictment makes a couple of references to Powell, the lawyer who led a legal effort to thwart the will of voters in Michigan and battleground states won by Biden, calling it part of a legal strategy that would "release the Kraken" — a reference to the film "Clash of the Titans."

Powell's role in Michigan, the indictment suggests, extended beyond her lawsuit in the state to helping coordinate the examination of equipment in Antrim County, where Trump allies seized on a human error that was quickly fixed, to spread disinformation about voting machines.

In early December 2020, Powell entered into an agreement with SullivanStrickler LLC, a Georgia-based forensic data firm "for the performance of computer forensic collections and analytics on Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Michigan and elsewhere," the indictment states. Later that month, she emailed the Chief Operations Office of the firm and asked him to send her and three unindicted and unnamed co-conspirators "'a copy of all data'" the firm obtained from the Michigan equipment, the indictment states. During a deposition with the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, Powell misrepresented her involvement in accessing voting machines.

When asked about efforts to access voting machines, Powell told the committee: "I didn't have any role in really setting them up or making sure how they were done that I remember," according to a transcript of her deposition. The indictment states it was incorrect to state that she wasn't involved in arranging "efforts to access voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, or Antrim County, Michigan."

Criminal cases in Michigan related to 2020 election

The criminal charges in Georgia follow others brought in Michigan against Trump allies accused of trying to overturn the election with a fake Electoral College certificate and conspiring to gain unlawful access to voting machines.

Contact Clara Hendrickson: chendrickson@freepress.com or 313-296-5743. Follow her on Twitter @clarajanehen.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan's role in Georgia grand jury's Trump indictment