Updated at 3:30 p.m.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers was a member of an advisory board at Telefonica, a cell phone service provider operating largely in Latin America which admitted in 2022 to collaborating with the Venezuelan government — then led by the now-deposed Nicolas Maduro — to spy on its citizens.

Rogers, a former Congressman who represented a mid-Michigan district from 2001 to 2015, sat on the company’s cybersecurity and technical innovations board for more than five years, earning nearly $100,000 in compensation as a result, according to public financial disclosures filed during his 2024 run for the U.S. Senate and his most recent bid.

When asked, Rogers’ campaign claimed that it was the first the former representative knew of the connection between Telefonica and the Maduro regime, despite the incident being widely reported by both a Spanish news outlet and The Washington Post.

Rogers’ campaign also said that his work with the board largely focused on advising Telefonica’s cybersecurity division on technical items and threats from China.

The campaign further blamed Democrats working against him for drawing a connection to him and Maduro that it claims did not exist, and chalked it up to “fake news about a former House Intelligence Chair and national security expert having ties to the very regime he has outspokenly condemned, and celebrated the downfall of.”

“Mike merely served on a technology advisory board, where he advised on how to stop the Chinese Communist Party from infecting the company’s networks,” said Rogers spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet. “This is nothing more than a flailing attempt to distract from the fact that the Michigan Democrat candidates are out-of-touch with working people and consistently trailing Mike Rogers by every barometer.”

The campaign was asked to provide Michigan Advance with a job description outlining Rogers’ role with the company showing that his work was focused solely on China.

An offer letter from Telefonica outlining Rogers’ role states that he would provide the board with “input, ideas and expert advice about Telefonica’s security decisions as requested by the company from time to time” according to the board’s specific charter.

The offer letter does not, however, specifically note that Rogers’ input and expertise was solely focused on Chinese security and network threats.

Whether Rogers knew the extent of the company’s collaboration with the Venezuelan government while he worked for Telefonica between April 2018 and October 2024 remains an open question, but what is certain is that Rogers has not publicly denounced the collaboration between Telefonica and the former Maduro regime.

The Advance asked Rogers’ campaign if it would do so now.

Brouillet said that Rogers believes any company that conspires with a criminal regime should be held accountable.

Rogers has, in the inverse, publicly praised President Donald Trump taking military action to depose Maduro, extradite him to the U.S. and put the former dictator up on drug trafficking charges in New York.

Rogers has a history of positioning himself as a major critic of Maduro

Maduro came into power following Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013 and remained the head of state until the U.S. government, under the Trump regime, took action against Maduro earlier this month.

On the day Maduro was captured, Rogers made a public statement praising Trump’s action.

“President Trump sent a loud and clear message: don’t mess with the US. Any foreign adversary who tries to kill Americans will pay the price. Bin Laden learned that lesson when I served as House Intel Chair,” Rogers said in a statement. “Today, Maduro was held accountable for endangering our nation with deadly poison. More Americans have died from drug overdose since 2018 than in World War I, World War II, & the Vietnam War combined. The crisis has to stop. Thankfully, President Trump is taking bold action to keep our communities safe. Our borders are secure, murders in US cities are down with drug interdiction and deportation of criminal illegal aliens, and waterborne drugs running into the US are down over 90%. Now, we’re bringing narcoterrorists to justice.”

A search of Rogers’ social media pages shows that he was quick to criticize both Maduro, in 2019, and former President Joe Biden, in 2024, over crime and immigration issues.

Rogers, as a featured guest on WOOD 106.9 FM, stated his belief that the world was better off without Maduro in power.

In 2019, Rogers posted to X, then Twitter, an article from insightcrime.org detailing criminal connections between Maduro and drug traffickers — an early pretext for charging Maduro with the crimes he now faces in the U.S. The article exposes what a former head of Venezuelan military intelligence witnessed in his time working for the regime, which included top figures in Maduro’s political orbit allowing drug traffickers to move freely in and out of Venezuela.

“This is the real Venezuela,” Rogers wrote in that post.

In 2024, Rogers criticized former President Joe Biden in a series of posts on X, saying the former president should declare the Tren de Aragua criminal gang a terrorist organization. Rogers brings up Maduro again in one post, as well.

It’s past time Joe Biden declares Tren da Aragua for what it is: An international criminal organization, terrorizing Americans.
Maduro is emptying his prisons and flooding America with dangerous criminals through our wide open border. Enough is enough.
— Mike Rogers (@MikeRogersForMI) March 18, 2024

An interview with Rogers conducted by former congressman Dave Camp for the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy notes that the podcast was a vehicle to share his insider knowledge of foreign policy, federal police work and security insights.

Much of his work with the boards he served on in his post-congressional life centered around the same insider knowledge. Still, Rogers’ campaign said that it had first heard about Telefonica’s connection to Maduro, through its business in Venezuela, when the Advance had asked for a comment in the course of reporting this story.

The Telefonica-Maduro connection was widely reported in 2021

Telefonica’s security and cybersecurity advisory council was created in 2018, which the company said would reinforce its digital and comprehensive security strategy, as well as play a role in protecting its own assets and the data of its customers.

The council included Rogers, and highlighted his work with the FBI but also as a member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee.

Public records show Rogers served on Telefonica’s Ingenieria Y Seguridad committee for six years. It was one of several boards he sat on after leaving the U.S. House of Representatives in 2015, each focused on cybersecurity and data intelligence, which falls in line with Rogers’ experience as chair of the House Intelligence Committee and as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Multiple financial disclosure reports filed for his Senate campaigns, the first of which he narrowly lost to now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin, are accessible to the public on the Senate’s online database. They show Rogers received $94,241 as board compensation from Telefonica Ingenieria Y Seguridad.

Compensation that he received from the board between 2018 and 2022 is not publicly available.

Telefonica, based in Madrid, Spain, has business throughout Latin America, working with different subsidiaries to provide region-specific cell phone services.

One of those regions is Venezuela, operating as Telefonica Movistar. In 2022, Telefonica released a transparency report that revealed a wide swath of data interceptions into the private communications of Venezuelan Telefonica Movistar customers at the behest of Maduro’s security agencies, according to the watchdog group Ve Sin Filtro.

The report said that the company, in 2021, worked at the behest of the Maduro regime to intercept those communications against 1.5 million customers in Venezuela, more than 20% of both telephone and internet lines offered by Telefonica Movistar. Calls were tapped, text messages were monitored and the locations of customer phones were handed over to Venezuelan authorities, Ve Sin Filtro reported. The interceptions also included the capturing of customer internet traffic.

Other nations within the region that were included in the report also had data interception within their home countries, but at a much lower rate than what Venezuela had acquired.

In some cases, specific internet pages were blocked and accounts hacked, which rang true in the case of a Venezuelan human rights organization. Some of these requests came from the National Telecommunications Commission, or CONATEL, which is the Venezuelan government’s regulatory body over telecommunications within its borders.

The watchdog group noted that data interceptions performed by telecoms on orders from their regulating governments can be key ways for law enforcement to investigate serious crimes, but the wide array of interceptions performed by Maduro’s regime pointed more toward systemic abuse of human rights standards and judicial due process.

Ve Sin Filtro reported that agencies that were able to access who a user was calling, how long the calls lasted, what the subscriber’s data showed, included the military, Venezuela’s public ministry, its main criminal investigation agency, police forces, and its National Experimental Security University.

“Nowhere does it mention that the orders come from courts or come with the approval of judges, as they do in other countries, which means there isn’t evidence of the validation of courts for these interventions as it is required by Venezuelan law, with particular exceptions such as the case of emergencies and flagrant crimes, in which the CICPC can make a direct request,” the group said, referring to Telefonica’s transparency report. “But even in these cases the prosecutor must be notified and it must be included in the file.”

Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on the document, noting that the admission fell in line with what human rights organizations have called massive surveillance of the Venezuelan people over the course of the last decade. It also noted that human rights defenders in Venezuela believed the espionage targeted opposition politicians and activists.

The Washington Post also reported on the company’s report and findings, writing that the incursions included wire taps but also the censoring of content like news websites, political commentary portals, and even streaming media websites like SoundCloud. Three human rights organizations were blocked by Telefonica and the Maduro regime and two websites providing VPN, or virtual private network, services. People in restrictive nations often use private networks to access internet service or webpages that are censored in their regions, and have played a key role in pushing out social media content during times of protest or revolution.

The Post also interviewed Miguel Henrique Otero, president of El Nacional, one of Venezuela’s last remaining independent newspapers, when it wrote about the issue in 2022.

He said it was clear to him and other like-minded Venezuelans that Telefonica was complicit in following orders from the Maduro regime to violate human rights, without justification or due process.

This story was updated to include additional comment from the Mike Rogers campaign.

A union-backed auto worker at Ford Motor Co. was caught on video heckling President Donald Trump as a “pedophile protector” when he visited a Dearborn factory on Tuesday ahead of his address to the Detroit Economic Club. The video that has now gone viral shows Trump responded in kind by mouthing an expletive at the worker, twice, and displaying a middle finger as he walked away.

Now, the union says the worker has been suspended while Ford looks into the matter.

A representative from the UAW told Michigan Advance that they could confirm that he was suspended but the length of the suspension was unknown. The union was also uncertain about the process that would follow to investigate the matter.

A message seeking comment from Ford to confirm if the worker was fired or suspended was not immediately returned on Tuesday evening.

In a statement to the Advance, White House communications director Steven Cheung called the worker “a lunatic” who was “wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage.”

“And the president gave an appropriate and unambiguous response,” Cheung said.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) said she spoke to a well placed source in the worker’s local union who said he was facing disciplinary action.

“Ford said they can’t talk about it because it’s a human resources issue,” Tlaib said. “In the past, when President Obama (went) onto the plant floor and other times people have said some terrible things, they didn’t get fired.”

@michiganadvance #trump #epsteinfiles @Distillsocial ♬ Quiet Music – Stacey Barelos

U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Ann Arbor) also told the Advance that the union confirmed that the confrontation meant the man was facing disciplinary action.

Dingell also said she was inquiring with Ford about the status of the man’s employment, and if he was being suspended and investigated in violation of his free speech rights.

“When you’re on a factory floor with union members that have strong feelings, you need to be prepared for whatever they’re gonna say, and I hope they’re not firing him because I believe in free speech,” Dingell said in an interview. “The UAW worker was expressing his right to free speech, and I’m asking questions as to what has happened.”

The video, which was first published by Distill Social shows Trump walking around a raised portion of the Dearborn F-150 plant when the worker, who is not seen on screen, yells to Trump and calls him a “pedophile protector,” a reference to Trump’s widely reported connections to deceased pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and the Trump administration’s bungling of a new law that ordered the FBI to release all of the files that the department had available to them.

Some have seen the constant delays from the FBI and the slow walk to release the files as Trump protecting either himself or his wealthy elite friends from scrutiny or a clear connection to Epstein.

In response to the confrontation, the Democratic National Committee denounced Trump for being “more concerned with his ego than his spiraling economy, where job cuts are skyrocketing, hiring has slowed, unemployment remains high, and prices continue to soar.”

“As working families struggle to make ends meet in Trump’s economy, the Trump family and their wealthy donors keep getting richer — there’s no bigger ‘F-you’ than that,” said DNC Senior Advisor for Messaging, Mobilization and Strategy Tim Hogan in a statement. “The real question is: Why does the mere mention of Epstein set him off?”

Tlaib echoed that point.

“The worker could have said anything, but this worker felt compelled to say you’re protecting a pedophile. I feel very strongly that Ford Motor Company is sending a message that people can’t stand up for sexual abuse survivors,” Tlaib said.

Tariffs lodged by President Donald Trump would have an outsized impact on Michigan’s economic standing, particularly its manufacturing and automotive sectors, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in an economic speech Tuesday.

“Michigan understands the negative consequences of unfettered trade with other countries that don’t play fair,” Whitmer said. “Decades of offshoring and outsourcing shipped hundreds of thousands of good-paying, middle-class jobs overseas and shuttered hundreds of factories. The ripple effects were devastating. Fewer people, empty main streets, crumbling roads, and shrinking schools.”

The speech, delivered at Michigan’s Heritage Hall in Lansing, had two goals: addressing the state’s budget impasse and detailing the damage Trump’s tariffs would continue to have on the state.

“I hear this from employers in Michigan and in every meeting on the investment mission to Japan and Germany,” Whitmer said. “Companies that have invested in Michigan for decades brought up uncertainty caused by our national tariff policy. They want to invest in Michigan, but tariffs are keeping them on the sidelines. Uncertainty breeds paralysis. And paralysis costs jobs.”

Whitmer’s address came following a weeklong stint in Japan on a venture to secure job deals. The Democrat has made trips like this since she started her second term in 2023.

The governor said no industry is more at risk from tariffs than automakers and suppliers, with 1.2 million Michiganders employed in the automotive supply chain. That equates to one in five Michigan jobs.

Whitmer toughens budget talk against Michigan Republicans with shutdown looming

“Canada and Mexico are our biggest auto trading partners, with car parts crossing both borders an average of eight times,” she said. “But now, additional 25% tariffs have been slapped on foreign-made auto parts, including those from Canada and Mexico. Even higher tariffs on steel and aluminum, two materials crucial for building cars, exacerbate the problem. ”

Uncertainty, Whitmer said, has been crippling manufacturing from making investments. It was in that vein that Whitmer also hinted at new policies for job creation in Michigan, noting that the state needs new tools to leverage its workforce in manufacturing to compete with other states and nations.

The governor outlined three goals toward that aim: make it easier to build factories in Michigan, create and retain jobs to run them, and make it easier to incentivize innovation.

A key tool Michigan has tried in the last few years was in the form of economic and monetary incentives for companies, which have mixed results, especially in the face of Trump’s tariffs.

Whitmer seemingly acknowledged the difficulty of using incentives or other proverbial carrots to spur innovation and business growth on Tuesday.

“No tool is perfect, but we have to do something to deliver more wins for Michigan, because competition is fierce,” she said.

TRAVERSE CITY – U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers was scheduled as one of the keynote speakers at a glitzy Republican dinner on Friday to honor the late state Sen. George McManus of Traverse City, but after an hour of shaking hands and greeting up north party fixtures, Rogers left early and never addressed the crowd.

His campaign for the U.S. Senate said Rogers was happy to be there but had another campaign event in Gaylord and that the dinner was running over time, prompting his exit. But the crowd at the dinner appeared to be visibly bewildered when it was announced midway through that Rogers was no longer there and they wouldn’t get to hear him speak, seeing as how he was one of the main draws of the evening.

Few people at the dinner were aware of any other Republican event featuring Rogers in the region that evening.

The campaign did not respond when asked about the nature of the event Rogers left to attend.

The McManus dinner, held in a sprawling conference center space at the Great Wolf Lodge in scenic Traverse City, however, started promptly at 6 p.m. as planned and concluded right around the stated 9 p.m. end time.

There was talk at the dinner that Rogers was upset because he was not speaking first – U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Watersmeet) was scheduled to speak first, and did.

Bergman told the Advance afterward that the rumor of Rogers demanding to speak first was inaccurate, and that last minute scheduling items often come up for candidates seeking important federal office.

The itinerary clearly showed that Bergman was first in the order, but Bergman made a comment at the beginning of his speech that he didn’t think he was supposed to be going first.

Still, Rogers never spoke to the crowd, first or otherwise. He and his campaign staff were present in the room for the opening prayer and pledge of allegiance, but were absent when the speaker portion began.

As the night wore on, some patrons, who were seated close to an area for the Advance and other local press, could be seen whispering to each other and repeatedly pointing to the itinerary of speakers.

Rogers and his wife created a social media video showing them at the Great Wolf Lodge on Friday, saying that the room was packed with Republicans who were fired up for the 2026 contest. It is unclear when the video was taken – before he entered the building or when he was on his way out the door.

His Facebook page, where the video was posted, did not feature a mention of another event later that evening.

Rogers did, however, post pictures from the Cops & Doughnuts location in Gaylord on Saturday morning, which indicated that he had visited the city at some point this weekend.

Dennis Lennox, a political consultant and one of the co-organizers of the event, spoke to the Advance on Saturday in his personal capacity and not as a representative of the group behind the dinner.

Lennox said that he also was unaware of any other event planned in Northern Michigan on Friday evening, nor was there an event that other attendees knew about.

Indeed, the affair on Friday was a venerable who’s who of up north Republicans, party folk from around the state and donors who attended the dinner in honor of McManus, a well-respected regional Republican senator who served in the upper chamber for a decade.

“It’s unfortunate because a lot of people came to the dinner looking forward to hearing the presumptive Republican nominee for United States Senate, and for whatever reason, did not get an opportunity to hear from him,” Lennox said. “Now, with that said, I would also, for the record, say that pretty much everybody in attendance last night is a political person, current or former, and understands that things come up and can, and things can and do happen.”

Lennox did note that the situation was odd, either way.

Still, the event continued on unabated, allowing other Republican candidates an opportunity to speak to donors and GOP faithful in Michigan’s north country.

That included gubernatorial candidate Tom Leonard and attorney general candidate Doug Lloyd, who many at the event said were the stars of the show.

Leonard says Michigan Republicans should focus more on mental health care

Leonard needed no introduction as the former Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, the former 2018 nominee for attorney general and a candidate for the same office in 2022.

Yet the dinner, which featured no other candidates for governor on the speaking schedule, used the address as a case for why Republicans should nominate him in the 2026 primary.

“When you look at the state of this state right now, did you know the only state that Michigan beat for population growth the first two decades of this century was West Virginia? We are currently 49 out of 50 in unemployment. We are bottom 10 for income total, and if we don’t change it, the next few years, we’re going to be 49 out of 50,” Leonard warned. “The last thing I want, the last thing anybody in this room wants, is for their child or their grandchild to come to them and say, ‘Dad, Grandma, Mom, grandpa, I’ve got to leave the state for better opportunity.’”

Although Leonard said trips to Florida for family time doesn’t sound half bad, he can’t rationalize giving up the fight and letting nearby states like Ohio steal Michigan’s future.

“We’ve got to turn this around,” Leonard said, and made a case for how he would do it.

The candidate mentioned state occupational licensure reform, which has bipartisan support in the state Legislature, to help reduce hoops for licensed professionals seeking to practice in Michigan.

On education, Leonard made another pitch for Republicans to stand steadfast behind school choice, particularly home schooling, which he said has been under attack for years.

Another issue that Leonard championed on Friday evening was expanded access to mental health care.

That push may very well resonate with people in Traverse City following the recent tragic multiple stabbing event at an area Walmart. The alleged perpetrator reportedly had severe mental health issues that went unaddressed, and many have said that better access to care might have prevented the stabbing.

“Why should Republicans ever shy away from mental health reform? … This is something that’s been near and dear to my heart for nearly 20 years,” Leonard said. “I always ask this question, ‘why is it that we should wait for somebody to hurt themselves or hurt somebody else before we get them the help that they need?’ Republicans ought to be running on this issue.”

Leonard also said Republicans in the next cycle need to run on positivity and solutions and not on old grievances against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or any of the candidates seeking to succeed her.

“I talk to police officers that are overwhelmed because of this mental health crisis that is facing our state, and frankly, they don’t want a candidate for governor, they don’t want any politician, that’s going to go out there every single day dividing us, dividing others, and poking others,” Leonard said. They want somebody that’s going to listen to them, and they want something that’s going to bring real solutions to the table and solve their problems.”

Leonard concluded by saying that’s what Republicans are going to see with his campaign over the next several months.

Lloyd touts prosecutor work in Eaton County as pathway to AG’s office

The fight to elect a Republican to the attorney general’s office after eight years of Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel is also of high priority for the GOP faithful across the state.

Lloyd, the current Eaton County prosecutor, said his experience in the office will translate well into the state’s top law enforcement position. He said that the attorney general is also tasked with protecting constitutional rights, not just prosecuting crimes, adding that it takes experience to be able to counsel the Legislature against making bad laws that could harm citizens, and to have the restraint to focus on state issues, a knock on Nessel’s push to repeatedly sue the administration of President Donald Trump on a multitude of federal policies in the opening months of his second term.

“We see local sheriffs and prosecutors who are understaffed and overwhelmed every single day as they battle to fight and continue on with the large case loads that they must carry,” Lloyd said. “But instead of the attorney general using her resources in a way that is beneficial to the state, she decides to play political games, filing suits against the Trump administration, instead of actually being a leader.”

Lloyd asked Republicans in the room to help nominate an attorney general candidate who could actually win the general election, a subtle knock against candidates in the past who lost to Nessel, which includes Leonard and former 2022 nominee Matt DePerno.

To Leonard’s credit, his race against Nessel was incredibly close, with the Republican candidate losing by less than 3 percentage points. DePerno, however, lost to Nessel by nearly 10 percentage points.

“In 2026 what you need to understand is that Republicans must win,” Lloyd said. “We need to nominate candidates who can actually rally the party and the votes. We will need winners, not distractions.”

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

Barry Croft and Adam Fox, the men convicted of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the summer of 2020, could be on a list for potential presidential pardons, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s new pardon attorney.

The comments came from Ed Martin Jr., a conservative activist who had been nominated as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia before having his nomination withdrawn earlier this year. Martin is now a pardon attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Appearing on a conservative podcast last week, Martin said that the administration of President Donald Trump “can’t leave” Croft and Fox “behind.”

Martin also called Croft and Fox “victims” and likened their cases to the criminal charges that were brought against the January 6 Capitol insurrectionists, the Associated Press reported. Trump pardoned more than 1,500 defendants charged in the Capitol attack on his first day back in office.

A message seeking comment from Whitmer’s office was not immediately returned.

Conservative activists and conspiracy theorists have long alluded to the plot against Whitmer as a federal government-led operation to entrap the participants, but numerous pieces of evidence shown in court detailed the breadth of Croft and Fox’s involvement in spearheading the plan and recruiting others to join in the plot – including eventually an informant working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Appeals court upholds convictions of 2 men in plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Martin appears to be among those who viewed the prosecution of Croft and Fox as the weaponization of the federal government, a running theme in the Trump White House. Martin on the podcast vowed to take a hard look at their cases in his new role. Both Croft and Fox are serving nearly 20-year prison terms in a high security federal prison located in Colorado.

Several other men were charged with conspiracy to kidnap Whitmer but were either acquitted of or pleaded guilty to the crimes.

Croft and Fox attempted to appeal their convictions, but the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the federal district court’s decision.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

Rep. Angela Rigas, chair of the Michigan House Oversight Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, released a scathing statement Wednesday evening blasting Attorney General Dana Nessel over continued delays in producing requested documents related to the Flint water criminal prosecutions.

Nessel’s office delivered numerous documents to Rigas’s office on Wednesday, but the representative said it was not at all what she requested.

“Dana Nessel’s office sent us an incomplete, incoherent mess of documents on a password-protected flash drive like they were bringing us the Holy Grail,” Rigas said.

Rigas had requested documents related to the legal battles that ensued during Nessel’s term and in the aftermath of Flint’s water supply being contaminated in 2014. The contamination occurred due to a switch of the water supply without proper lead contamination prevention.

Former Attorney General Bill Schuette began an investigation and prosecution, the latter of which began in 2016. Schuette charged a city of Flint employee and two employees with what was then known as the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality [now known as the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy].

Nessel became attorney general in 2018 and scuttled Schuette’s investigation and prosecution to begin anew in 2021. She formed a Flint water prosecution team led by Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy and former Michigan Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud while Nessel spearheaded the civil litigation side, which resulted in a mammoth settlement.

The criminal cases resulted in charges against former Governor Rick Snyder and several members of his administration, but those charges were later dismissed after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the prosecutorial team had used a one-man grand jury process to indict them without at first holding a preliminary examination that would have given the defendants a chance to poke holes in the attorney general’s presentation of probable cause.

Justices of the high court ruled the process as unconstitutional, and the charges were dismissed shortly thereafter.

Rigas (R-Caledonia) as the chair of the House Oversight subcommittee, requested records from Nessel on March 12 with a deadline of March 25 to give the subcommittee various documents. The request included a comprehensive itemized list of all billable hours, legal fees and associated costs incurred during Nessel’s tenure as attorney general, including personnel time, outside counsel and expert witnesses; a breakdown of all state funds allocated and expended on these cases; copies of contracts and invoices or memorandums of understanding with third parties retained by her office; and a summary of reimbursements, settlements or cost recoveries tied to the cases.

Nessel requested an eight-week extension, which Rigas granted, with a deadline of Tuesday.

Rigas in a news release issued Wednesday evening said the attorney general’s staff brought a password protected flash drive to Rigas’ office, which was also shared with some members of the Lansing Capitol press corps. Nessel’s office also shared a copy of a letter sent to Rigas’ office on Tuesday indicating that the document haul was just one half of those requested by Rigas and that the other portion would be delivered to the representative on or before June 17.

Rigas said that the flash drive contained “a mass array of unrelated documents that were never requested, mostly from [former Attorney General] Bill Schuette’s tenure.” The documents delivered to Rigas mostly contained contracts with attorneys and appointed special counsel Todd Flood and various invoices from Flood’s office.

Needless to say, Rigas was unhappy with what was turned over to her office.

“[Nessel] and her office have consistently failed to meet deadline after deadline, and it’s unacceptable,” Rigas said. “She has failed to follow simple directions and comply with what has so clearly been requested. There will be no more extensions. No more games. This ends now.”

A request for comment was sent to the Attorney General’s office, but has yet to be returned.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.