Six Republicans signed a paper declaring themselves Nevada’s rightful electors after the 2020 election, and on Thursday a Clark County judge ruled they could not have meant to deceive anyone — because they announced the forgery on television. Which is to say, the man who holds up the bank with the cameras rolling has not really robbed the bank. Judge Mary Kay Holthus dismissed the felony forgery charges against the six, accepting that public admission of the forgery was proof of innocence. A kid shoplifts a pair of sneakers tonight; six men signed a counterfeit electoral certificate and walked.
There were six names on the certificate. They identified themselves as “the duly elected and qualified electors” of Nevada. They affixed their signatures on December 14, 2020, the same day the real electors met, and they sent the document to Washington. It declared Donald Trump the winner of a state Joe Biden had carried by roughly 33,000 votes. The forgery was not alleged. The forgery was the document. It was a paper claiming a power the signers did not have, in a ceremony designed to look like one they did.
“The court concludes the evidence is insufficient to support a reasonable inference that defendants acted with the requisite intent to defraud,” Judge Holthus ruled. The forgery had to be secret to be a forgery; a loud forgery is a political statement, and the court will not second-guess a political statement. That is what the phrase reasonable inference does in the hands of a judge who does not wish to try the case. Six people signed a false instrument. They claimed to be officers of the state they were not. They sent the false instrument to the federal government, in the form prescribed for the real thing. The judge’s ruling on Thursday is that the only thing missing from the crime was the whisper. The forgery was loud. Therefore the forgery was not a forgery. That is the structure, and the structure works.
Attorney General Aaron Ford brought felony forgery charges in December 2023. Holthus dismissed the case once on venue, in June 2024, and the Nevada Supreme Court reversed. The case returned to her courtroom in February, with the judge already raising the very theory she would adopt Thursday — that public announcement of the act undermined the prosecution’s claim of intent to deceive. On Thursday she adopted it. A felony forgery case has now been dismissed twice in the same courtroom, on two different theories, and the six signatories of a forged presidential elector certificate have walked out of Clark County both times.
These are not isolated men. They are the Nevada branch of a seven-state scheme: alternate slates of electors submitted by Republicans in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin after the 2020 election, each one a forged certificate, each one designed to overturn a result the signatories had lost. Fake electors in Michigan were charged under state law. Fake electors in Arizona have been indicted, dismissed, and re-indicted — the prosecutor dropped the case against Giuliani and Meadows in June, then vowed a new indictment. Fake electors in Georgia were charged as part of the Fulton County RICO case against the broader apparatus. And on Thursday the Nevada six walked, because the document that announced itself was not, in the eyes of this court, a document that deceived.
The pattern is the structure, not the luck. Powerful actors attempting to overturn an election will attempt it through instruments whose legal form gives them room to deny their own intent. A false certificate is filed as a placeholder, a courtesy, a preserve-the-record measure — never as a forgery. The forgeries are loud so the forgeries cannot be forgeries. The courts, weighted with judges who came up through the same political selection machinery, oblige. The defense has its own newspapers. The prosecution has to make its own facts reach a jury, and the jury, in Nevada, has not been permitted to hear them.
The pattern is the pattern. The bank that laundered money for the Sinaloa cartel in 2012 paid $1.9 billion in a deferred-prosecution agreement and not one individual went to jail. The Sacklers extracted billions from Purdue Pharma while Americans died of OxyContin; not one of them has been criminally charged. Wells Fargo opened millions of fake accounts in working-class neighborhoods and the $3 billion settlement was reached “with the bank itself, not with any individuals responsible for the fraud.” The men who forge an election walk. The men who forge an account walk. The men who forge a prescription walk. The kid with the sneakers in his coat does not have a lawyer who has argued venue once and is now arguing loudness as innocence.
I have watched this movie since Nixon — when the forgery was the footnote and the break-in was the lead. The forgery is not new. The procurement of forgery by presidential campaign is not new. The procedural slip-out that lets the forgers go is not new. What is new is the open admission of the crime as a defense to the crime. Holthus ruled that announcing the forgery was evidence of innocence. The forgeries were performed in public; the forgeries were performed for an audience; the audience was the United States Senate, which on January 6, 2021, was told to accept the false papers as a reason to reject the lawful electors of seven states. Announcing it was the point. Announcing it was how the scheme was supposed to work.
Ford calls the decision “once again, wrong” and says he will appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court. He should. The court should remember that the men who signed this paper were trying to install a president who had lost the election. They were not confused. They were not mistaken. They were doing what the document says they were doing. The next forgery is already being drafted by men who have now been told that the loudness of the lie is its own defense.
The forgery is the forgery. The court has decided otherwise. The court is wrong.