Dana Nessel was subpoenaed TWICE not two weeks ago. A state attorney general being served with legal papers is unusual enough.
What’s more unusual is the subject of those subpoenas. The Michigan House Oversight Committee is demanding documents that may demonstrate how Nessel helped cover up possible crimes involving her political friends and actual family.
More unusual still? Not a word of those subpoenas has made its way into the pages of the state’s largest newspapers. Who knows why? Maybe the media is trying to protect its political dinner guests. Maybe it’s professional jealousy. The documents the Oversight Committee seeks have been well documented in this column space.
And I will continue to write about Nessel’s proclivity for selective prosecution, because it seems to me she has lost all sense of political duty and human decency.
Let me take you back five years ago.
I was profiling a man in December 2020 whose job it was to collect Covid-infected corpses from Michigan’s nursing homes during the deadliest month of the pandemic. Helping bag bodies was the only way I could get into the locked-down facilities to see if Gov. Whitmer’s mandate to place the sick inside the same buildings with the healthy was actually “good science” like she was claiming.
It was not. The “Covid Wings” I witnessed were uniformly separated from the healthy population by simple shower curtains. Nurses and attendants routinely passed back and forth.
The enormity of the blunder became apparent when the corpse collector took me to a crematorium in Metro Detroit. Bodies were stacked nearly to the roof, and management was forced to turn away more victims due the backlog. Most of the dead were elderly.
That ghastly scene of the workers and the body bags and the flames was burned into my brain. I shall never forget.
So I sued the state for its Covid-death data. I won that case. Sort of. I came to find out that the long-term care facilities’ death count was fake.
A subsequent study by the State Auditor General proved as much. His findings were dismissed by a group of hand-selected media who had never seen the actual audit.
Nessel also dismissed the under-counting of the dead, referring to human beings as “apples” and “oranges.”
She refused to investigate, telling a group of nursing-home lobbyists and CEOs in 2023 at their annual convention that they did a “phenomenal job.” (Nessel, it should be pointed out, takes a lot of money from the nursing-home lobby.)
This got my attention. If the attorney general could politicize the silent deaths of thousands of senior citizens, then what else was she sitting on?
Now come the subpoenas.
The first involves Nessel’s wife, Alanna Maguire, who is connected to a political “dark money laundering” scheme, according to a 2023 criminal referral sent to Nessel by Jocelyn Benson, our secretary of state.
Those charges were referred to Nessel more than two years ago, but the referral seems to have vaporized. Now, the Oversight Committee has unearthed it.
Meanwhile, people connected to the anti-lockdown “Unlock Michigan” campaign of 2020 in a similar situation were charged with crimes and face prison time and hefty fines.
The media spilled barrels of ink on the intricacies of that one. And yet nothing on the Fair and Equal Michigan campaign spearheaded by Maguire or Richard Czuba, the political pollster who raised money for that campaign. Curious.
The second subpoena involves Nessel’s (and Whitmer’s) gal pal, Traci Kornak, a slip-and-fall lawyer who moonlighted as the treasurer for the state Democratic Party. Kornak was accused—at the very least—of attempting to commit insurance fraud in the name of an elderly, brain-damaged client.
Kornak worked for Nessel’s transition team when Nessel was first elected to office. Because of this obvious conflict of interest, Nessel’s subordinates drew up an “ethical firewall” document so that Nessel wouldn’t involve herself in her friend’s criminal investigation.
But Nessel did involve herself, and Kornak was even given parts of the active case file where she was the suspect.
The media wrote nothing when I first exposed this. And now that the Oversight Committee is seeking those very same documents…more crickets from the media.
Let’s see where the Oversight Committee takes us. Because if it can move a political hack like Dana Nessel to the side, then maybe we can get true answers as to what happened in the nursing homes, what Whitmer knew, and when she knew it.
Then we might actually fix the abysmal state of end-of-life care in this state.
So I’m on it. I’ll stay on it. And I’ll see you next Tuesday.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools. Follow him on X @Charlieleduff.
