radiofree.asia

Michigan’s Trumpian Attorney General Is a Democrat

Democrats call Trump an authoritarian but often act like him in response to pro-Palestinian protest. Case in point: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, who was recently forced to drop her felony prosecutions of student protesters over bias charges.

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel speaks at a campaign rally held by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) on October 16, 2022, in East Lansing, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)

A police crackdown on students protesting Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. An attorney general throwing the book at the antiwar activists. Reckless accusations of antisemitism against anyone who disagrees. Protesters’ doors kicked down and raided by armed police. It’s just another day in Donald Trump’s America.

Except in this case in question, none of it was done by Trump or even happened while he was president. All of these things happened in a Democrat-controlled state, at the hands of a Democratic attorney general, almost all of it while a Democrat was president.

Felony charges were brought against seven antiwar student protesters by Michigan attorney general Dana Nesssel last year, charges that have been criticized as an assault on the rights to free speech and protest — and which were, fortunately and unexpectedly, dropped by Nessel earlier this week. The whole episode is a reminder that as much as the Democratic Party rightly charges Trump and other right-wing political opponents with authoritarianism, its own officials have often acted indistinguishably from the president in defense of Israel’s bloody war on Gaza.

The reasons behind the dropped charges are complicated, but it’s clear that public outrage played a role. In her statement on Monday, Nessel complained that even though she was sure a jury would have convicted the students, the case had “become a lightning rod of contention,” and that “baseless and absurd allegations of bias” helped lend “a circus-like atmosphere to these proceedings,” leading her to conclude that continuing to pursue the charges was not “a prudent use of my department’s resources.”

Nessel has been the target of sustained public pressure for prosecuting the activists. The bias charges Nessel complained about partly referred to the words of Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who alleged “bias” within Nessel’s office. Nessel never brought charges against right-leaning anti-lockdown protesters who, unlike students protesting the Gaza war, were often heavily armed and had a habit of sending death threats to the governor — she even let them flout social-distancing orders and at one point issued a directive to police actively forbidding them from cracking down on protesters who were.

She then tried to distract from this hypocrisy by lying that Tlaib had said that she was only prosecuting the student protesters because Nessel is Jewish — a lie that, for a time, successfully distracted people from the prosecutorial overreach in question and was assisted by congressional Democrats and mainstream media pundits.

But as time wore on, the pressure piled up. Nessel was criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, she was booed and jeered by members of her own party at Michigan’s Democratic convention, and protesters demanded for months that she drop the charges, marching through the state capitol in April. An embarrassing Guardian investigation at one point revealed that Nessel had been urged by University of Michigan governing board members to take the unprecedented step of prosecuting the students herself when a local prosecutor, who is also Jewish, moved to dismiss the cases — board members who, it turned out, she had personal and financial connections to. It brought to mind exactly the kind of conflicts of interest that Democrats criticize when they involve the Trump administration.

Criticism increased after Michigan law enforcement smashed their way into the homes of several other antiwar activists, with Nessel actively defending the raids. It called to mind Nessel’s own words of criticism toward Trump’s threats in 2020 to send federal forces to Michigan to put down Black Lives Matter protesters: “It is about using the power of his office as a cudgel to punish those who use their constitutionally guaranteed rights to express views he disagrees with.”

 

Nessel’s dropping of the worst of the charges is not just a victory for basic civil liberties at a time they have come under threat in a way not seen in decades; it’s also a victory for public pressure over local officials’ overreach.

Two other factors played a role in making the case too inconvenient for Nessel to keep pursuing. One was that the students’ attorneys noticed that, in separate election fraud charges Nessel brought against the members of a local, all-Muslim city council, the attorney general’s office requested a special prosecutor take over the case because of allegations that she was perceived as biased against Muslims and Arabs. If Nessel thought that perception of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias was problematic enough that she needed to recuse herself from that case, the defense attorneys argued, how could she justify being involved in prosecuting the students, who are of Arab descent?

Next, a local Jewish nonprofit, wanting to defend Nessel from the bias charges, issued a public statement criticizing the attempt to get her to recuse herself — but accidentally entered it into the court proceedings as an official court document, making it seem like the group was trying to influence the judge, further complicating the case. In Monday’s statement, Nessel pointed to both of these as factors in her decision to drop the charges, calling the motion for recusal a “diversionary tactic” and mentioning the “impropriety” of the nonprofit sending its statement to the court.

So this is not a clean win on First Amendment grounds. But it is a victory for activist pressure and for free speech and the freedom to protest. It remains to be seen if the whole affair will deter Nessel from continuing to pursue the vandalism cases that saw activists’ homes broken into by officers last month.

It’s too bad Nessel is wasting law enforcement resources on harassing activists, because there are real crimes that could be prosecuted in the state — the now-decade-old poisoning of the city of Flint’s water supply, for instance. Unfortunately, the first thing Nessel did upon becoming attorney general was dismantle the prosecution of that crime and bungle its relaunch, letting the perpetrators get away scot-free.

This post was originally published on Jacobin.