It’s going on two years since Attorney General Dana Nessel charged Shawn Wilmoth—owner of First Choice LLC—with a raft of felonies that left the 2022 governor’s race in shambles.
Five Republican candidates paid Wilmoth hundreds of thousands of dollars to collect ballot signatures. In return, Wilmoth’s signature company cranked out tens of thousands of phony signatures. The candidates were kicked off the ballot, including frontrunner James Craig.
Two years later, Wilmoth still hasn’t seen a jury.
What gives?
The answer may lay in a long-forgotten criminal complaint that molders on Nessel’s desk.
Way before the governor debacle, back in January 2020, a group named Fair and Equal Michigan cranked up a campaign to get a gay rights initiative on the ballot. The co-chair of that campaign was Nessel’s wife, Alanna Maguire. That’s when a charity calling itself Bipartisan Solutions started funneling piles of money into the account of Fair and Equal.
Charities are not required to expose the identities of their donors, making it a perfect way to disguise the origins of political money.
One of the biggest donors to the Bipartisan Solutions was Michigan Energy First, a dark money group linked to DTE, which donated $275,000 to Bipartisan Solutions.
Bipartisan Solutions, in turn, donated $782,000 to Fair and Equal during the 2020 political cycle, according to tax filings.
(It should be noted that Nessel likes to make a show of haranguing DTE for its ubiquitous power outages and outrageous utility rates. Nessel badgers, but precious little ever changes.)
The gay rights initiative chaired by Nessel’s wife never made the ballot, however, because the secretary of state ruled on Oct. 13, 2021, that nearly 200,000 signatures were bogus.
And who “collected” those bogus signatures? Yep. Wilmoth again. His firm was paid more than $1 million for its efforts. Strangely, it appears the firm was never investigated in this case.
Two days after the signatures—and the ballot proposal—were tossed, Bipartisan Solutions was dissolved.
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Jump to July 6, 2022, when a complaint was filed by the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a nonpartisan watchdog group headquartered in Washington D.C.
The group alleged that the Bipartisan Solutions was not really a charity at all, but rather a beard for Fair and Equal to funnel money into the initiative, while shielding the identity of its donors.
As soon as money poured into Fair and Equal coffers from Bipartisan Solutions, a nearly identical amount would be paid out by Fair and Equal to its vendors, according to the complaint.
For instance: Bipartisan Solutions contributed $76,000 to Fair and Equal on Sept. 10, 2020. The very next day, Fair and Equal cut a check to First Choice Contractors, the company owned by Wilmoth, for $76,000.
The secretary of state’s office agreed with the watchdog group. “(I)t is clear that Bipartisan Solutions coordinated to some extent with Fair and Equal Michigan,” auditors wrote. “Any rationale to the contrary strains credulity.”
The secretary of state’s office sent criminal referral directly to Dana Nessel on April 18, 2023.
So what ever happened to that referral? Potential fines could total into the millions of dollars. According to state filings: the president, secretary and treasurer of Bipartisan Strategies were all the same person—Richard Czuba, a noted pollster often quoted by Michigan political media. Czuba did not return request for comment. Nor did Nessel. Nor did Maguire.
As for Wilmoth, when I attempted to speak with the corpulent calligrapher last week at his pretrial hearing, the ex-con gave me the finger.
There are many questions that need answering in this sordid affair. Not the least of which is why the attorney general has not stepped aside in a case with such obvious personal and professional conflicts.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools. Follow him on X @Charlieleduff. Independent reporter Bob Cushman contributed to this report. Follow him on X @BobCushman1776.
