A busy week in our town, The OTR guest this week is Mark Grebner, who gets paid to take a deep dive into Michigan voting rules to see what he can see.

Our lead story is charges filed against former House Speaker Lee Chatfield and lawmakers disclose where they're making their money.

Around the OTR panel, Craig Mauger, Jordyn Hermani and Joey Cappelletti sitting with us as we get the inside out.

Off the Record.

Production of Off the Record is made possible in part by Martin Waymire, a full service strategic communications agency, partnering with clients through public relations, digital marketing and public policy engagement.

Learn more at MartinWaymire.com.

And now this edition of Off the Record with Tim Skubick.

Thank you very much.

Welcome to Studio C as we continue with a very huge Newsweek in our town.

Dana Nessel State attorney general, making headlines as she takes on the former Speaker of the House, Lee Chatfield.

How come?

Earlier this week she charged former House Speaker Lee Chatfield 13 charges, including embezzlement, basically alleging that Chatfield and his wife used a nonprofit social welfare fund to fund his lifestyle.

Fund trips, pay off credit card, buy gifts, you know, buy, you know, clothing, different things like that.

And you know, that much of it remained hidden until there were sexual misconduct allegations in 2022.

All right.

That's a good set up for the piece.

We have on this very story.

Let's take a look.

In a seven year period of time, the state attorney general alleges that the most powerful man in the Michigan House at that time, Speaker Lee Chatfield, took in some $7 million in political contributions, all legal going into funds.

However, that by law did not have to be reported to anyone.

Attorney General Dana Nessel accuses Mr. Chatfield of taking those dollars and converting them for his own personal use for lavish trips to Las Vegas, to Orlando, the Bahamas.

And she claims he paid off $132,000 in credit card debts that not only benefited him but those around him.

It is not an exaggeration to say that his employees, friends and family all benefited from the extravagant misspending of these funds.

The attorney general says he's accused of 13 counts of wrongdoing and if convicted on the most severe charges, he could do 20 years behind bars.

To date, our investigation has uncovered evidence that Lee Chatfield used various different schemes to embezzle, steal and convert both private and public monies to fund a lavish lifestyle that a state salary could not possibly afford.

Beyond those lavish spending charges from the state, The attorney general was asked if she had proof that the speaker heard did anything legislatively for those persons who gave him the money.

She could not confirm that possible linkage.

Have not completed the investigation.

So I can't answer that question.

The attorney general complains about a culture under the dome that allows secret money to flow freely into the hands of politicians without any watchdog ing of the process.

To change Lansing's culture for one of secret donors.

And corruption requires and demands legislative solutions.

Legislation to force the disclosure of the very funds that Mr. Chatfield allegedly misspent is pending.

If convicted, however, Mr. Chatfield would join former House Republican Speaker Rick Johnson, who's doing hard time for taking bribes from those in the cannabis industry.

The attorney general says.

The attorney for Mr. Chatfield says, quote, “We are prepared to fight them every step of the way ” end quote.

So, Jordyn as you sat through that news conference, your thoughts?

I mean, first of all, I just also want to point out that when we're talking about Chatfield using spending well beyond his means, he was paying off like $130,000 worth of credit card debt.

He was going to the Bahamas, he was taking his children to Disney World.

They were buying coach and UGG just way outside the pale.

Now, the one thing that did stick out to me is the fact that the attorney general did say that charges are still pending potentially.

We don't know if this is the last that we will hear both of charges against Chatfield or potentially charges against any sort of associates.

If we remember two individuals very close to him earlier this year, Robyn and Menard, they were also hit with some pretty steep charges for doing pretty similar things.

And so, you know, it's a start that we're getting after this.

But I guess I'm looking toward legislative solutions here.

And I know that there is a package in the House that's going to attempt to shine some light on dark money spending in Lansing.

And it is a start, as many people have said, but I don't necessarily know if that would have precluded Chatfield from doing anything that he's accused of doing right now.

The question is, a lot of folks in town have these these funds.

This was not unique to Lee Chatfield.

So the question has to be asked, what about everybody else?

And that's the question that is truly the question.

This was a bombshell of a Newsweek.

That term gets thrown around a lot, but there is a financial reckoning happening or about to happen for the lawmakers in Lansing.

They know it.

The attorney general knows it.

You listen to what she says.

The top law enforcement official in our state told lawmakers this week that every day she hears from people in Lansing that bills are getting stopped because of secret donors to these accounts.

Well, I think.

If I asked the question, was there a linkage?

Was the speaker doing favors?

It's a good.

Question, but who knows the answer to that question?

Only Lee Chatfield.

And someone.

Else gave the money.

And the attorney general.

And what did she saying?

She is saying, hey, there are policies being stopped because of that.

This and she is the most dangerous person to Lansing establishment right now because she knows secrets.

She's calling for change.

This is all going to come out over the course of a potential trial.

The significance of this cannot be overstated.

Where does it go from here?

We'll see.

I mean, I think part of you know, we mentioned that the Menards you know, the aides were charged earlier, you know, a few months back and not too much happened.

I mean, I think we have these charges over and over again.

We had, you know, former Speaker Rick Johnson, you know, charged and we have these these press conferences.

We have Sunshine Week and not too much legislation comes out of it.

And so I think that's going to be really interesting is the charges against Chatfield.

I mean, how egregious it was and then only really came to light because of, you know, sexual assault allegations just kind of shows the system we have in place right now.

And I think the Democrats right now have, you know, potentially after winning special elections, have a few more months of a trifecta and really seeing if this would be a priority is going to be really interesting going forward.

This is a tough system.

It's interesting what Joe is saying.

This is a very tough system for officeholders to defend.

I mean, we have to note that the system that we have right now, our lawmakers, the people that make bills that affect all of us, are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from anonymous individuals who are interested in the policies before them.

Let's not, you know, sugarcoat this.

That is what happened is happening.

People interested in their decisions are giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The lawmakers are telling the people of Michigan, you don't deserve to know who these people are.

We're not going to tell you who these people are no matter what happens.

The silence, that is what they're telling us with the silence of these charges.

And that's what they're going to have to face down.

I was talking to State Representative Dillon Wagoner this week, and he said to me, I asked him, do you think these nonprofit donors should be disclosed?

And he said, of course, this is the most common sense thing we could possibly do.

And I think that's how a lot of voters are going to view it.

I mean, at the.

Examples he gave was polluter pay.

All right.

So industries that are polluting are not held accountable in any way.

They say that the allegedly this has been bottled up because big money flowing in.

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, I want to go off of what Craig said really quickly, which is I think when when, you know, these laws go to the ballot box, as we saw, you know, a few Novembers back, they get, you know, voters overwhelmingly approve of financial disclosure.

However, I don't know if lawmakers really think people are voting on these issues.

And I think that's part of the reason.

I mean, we could sit around here and we talk about these things and, you know, these investigations come out or it's it's in it ban.

But I don't know, you know, how many voters really know about Foya, things like that.

And I think that's why it's maybe not always a priority for these lawmakers.

Before we turn the page, let's just point out that obviously Mr. Chatfield is assume innocent until proven guilty and we've got a long ways to go.

This could be tied up in the courts for a while.

But the amazing thing about it is if this stuff is true, it was an elaborate I mean, you got to be pretty smart to figure out how to do this, to transfer and try to hide if that was what's going on.

So we'll see how it turns out.

Filings were made this week.

What did we learn about people in town vis a vis where they make their money?

Well, that depends on the financial disclosures that you looked at, because for some, such as actually Governor Gretchen Whitmer, she did outline pretty extensively, for instance, how much money is in a for a1k, any kind of properties that she has sort of any lobbyist interactions.

But then you have other individuals who disclosed nothing, not even their publicly available state salary.

And that just gets to the heart of the matter of we set up a system where while going back proposal one of 2022 required these things by law to be filed, legislation that enacted that enabled these lawmakers to opt into disclosing much of this.

So publicly available salaries, many opted not to disclose how much the value of their house was worth.

Many opted not to disclose spousal salaries, any kind of properties that they own.

And, you know, when we asked about that, when actually we asked about that earlier this week, the attorney general, Dana Nessel, who was one individual who didn't disclose much within her personal filings, she responded, Well, why does it matter how much my house is worth?

And that kind of gets to the heart of the matter where it does actually matter how much your house is worth.

Because if you are a public servant on $1,000 a year salary and you and your spouse is not making a ton of money, but you live in a $2 million home, where is that money coming from?

But the law does not require the law that we have does not require a house value to be listed in.

The attorney general said, Why should I have to disclose my house value when it's not in the law?

And that's the question.

It shouldn't be a question to her.

In my mind, she didn't decide this policy.

The legislators in Lansing, the people that serve in the state House and state Senate, put this policy in place.

It's incredibly vague.

There are no details there.

They made decisions that said we want to go the path of less disclosure instead of the path of more disclosure.

Here.

In her defense, she said, if they change the law, I will disclose.

Yes, that wasn't me trying to rag on her by any sense.

It was just she was the the highest authority that we've heard so far, sort of openly talk about these laws.

So that's not a dig against her.

She did everything to the letter of the law.

It's just that this law is completely toothless.

Well, let's point out the people.

You're right, Joey did vote for this financial disclosure reform, but it was up to the lawmakers to implement what the people said in the ballot proposal.

And they had the final say.

Yeah, they had the final say.

And again, they went the path of less disclosure.

They had the opportunity here and there were members of the state House that were trying to get them to do this, to shine light on their spouses income and honor and unearned assets, to shine light on trips that these individuals take that are funded by who knows who these individuals are funding these trips.

They go going to shine light on sports tickets that they get.

And they all decided, hey, we're not going to do that in this legislation.

We get vague disclosures from all the lawmakers just listing various companies that they're tied to not knowing what their financial connections are.

Look at the governor's disclosure.

I mean, let's let's talk about this instance for a minute.

In her disclosure, we learn that she has set up some type of Family Office LLC that's going to handle some of her financial arrangements.

Think about this.

She has a company now that can handle any business arrangement that she doesn't want to show up in this disclosure because it will be covered by this LLC.

So what are we accomplishing here?

If you can just set up another business to hide anything you don't want to be shown here.

What is the point of this?

I think that's part of also we haven't heard, you know, there is a package currently going through, you know, the bright, bright package, bright act.

And we haven't really heard from Democratic leadership about that, which is I think is, you know, part of the reason, you know, more things haven't passed is is you have a lot of these lawmakers, you know, Jerry Moss coming out and saying, you know, we need more transparency, we need more sunshine.

And it really at the end of the day, with these thin of majorities, it comes down to what Democratic leadership wants.

And there hasn't really been an appetite yet to implementing stricter restrictions or.

Disclosure to that point.

Now we're going to get your chance to see what the leadership is now that the D's have control of the House.

Again, they have supposedly the votes maybe not to do this stuff as the result of the special elections, right?

Yeah.

On Tuesday, we saw two house special elections in the 13th and 25th House districts.

They soundly reelected Democrats after two Democrats left office last year after becoming mayors of Westland and Warren.

Those individuals are expected to be sworn in sometime this month, which means we won't see a Democratic House back at full power until probably early, early May.

So when that happens, Speaker of the House Joe Tate has already said that the budget, the budget, the budget is the top priority.

But it is interesting because we have seen so many months go by with very little to show.

I mean, there has been obviously votes in House committees, but we are not really teeing up anything extremely large.

I mean, the Senate has the higher Michigan, the rebrand of the good jobs from Michigan that's coming over into the House, They'll have to deal with that.

But even then, when we get back to the fact that you talk about Dillon McCullough, he's been an absolute thorn in the side of Democrats when it comes to any kind of you know.

Everybody said, well, the governor's got her majority back.

Now it's, you know, get everything she wants.

No, that's.

Not the reasons.

This is such a fascinating moment with the transparency measures.

Normally what they would do is pivot to some other major issue.

We got to change the conversation.

We don't like this one.

They have nowhere to go.

There's nothing else for them that they can accomplish right now.

In the budget.

They can do the budget can.

Try to do the budget, but that's not going to devour the conversation like some of these policy discussions.

Will.

Well, if they're not debating it, what do we report exactly?

I mean, what are the what are the policy major policy bills that they could go to next?

All right.

Let's called in our guest, Mark Grebner of Mr. Grebner please.

Mr. Grebner welcome back to Off the Record.

Let me try in 20 seconds to explain what you do.

You get paid a boatload of money to start out with, to dive into the voting rolls in the state of Michigan, to find whatever you need to find based on what your clients want.

Is it pretty close to what you do except.

For the boatload?

Yes.

All right.

So my question is, how many dead people voted in 2022?

Are a handful because they died after submitting absentee ballots and before Election Day.

And generally those would have been caught by the clerks and corrected.

But in some cases, the death notice wouldn't have come through.

But some Republicans would argue, Mr. Grebner, that other dead people voted because some illegal people took those names and showed up as that person at the polls.

Does that go on?

Basically, no.

If the if somebody claims that, then there would be a particular ballot.

They'd have an application to vote to appear in the poll book.

And those Republicans would point to it and say, here are ten names.

I haven't seen one name of such a person.

I think there were probably five people who voted in the conditions.

I talked about.

There certainly aren't thousands.

And if there were even ten, why don't they have a name?

Why don't they point to a particular precinct.

Charge from the Republicans?

Yeah, all of the all of their claims about vote fraud are not backed up by actual documents.

They're not backed up by being able to point to a precinct, a time, a name and the rolls, that sort of thing.

When when we have fraudulent petitions, I have piles of petitions with fake names on them.

You know, I can show those.

I can appear, I can testify.

But the Republican claims about vote fraud always disappear.

When you say so.

Tell me five names.

Sure.

I guess we're coming into the 2024 election.

The last presidential election, as we all know, sparked some interesting claims regarding election integrity and security.

I guess what concerns you most heading into 2024 in Michigan with respect to election security?

Well, I don't know if it's exactly election security, but it's related.

The problem is that we've got the whole election system is changing day by day.

So we have new laws, we have new methods of voting.

We have a new relation of voters.

I mean, we have same day registration.

We didn't have that before.

We have no reason absentee voting.

We have early voting, we have drop boxes.

The whole system might kind of fold up in some interesting ways and might fail because of staffing problems.

It might fail because of counting problems.

If there were fewer moving parts, I'd feel more comfortable.

So are you looking at the 24 election?

That is almost a stress test of all the new things that we've implemented being used finally all at once during a presidential election?

Yeah, except we shouldn't do it that way.

That's right.

Yeah.

You know, in 1972, which is before most of you were born, and in 2000 we had elections that turned into disasters in many places in the state because there were lines that lasted 6 hours or 4 hours.

The polls, there were people who were never able to vote in the year 2000, never able to vote in Michigan, because the whole system just collapsed in various ways.

People are going to take what you just said and blare that everywhere.

I think that the system might fail.

What do you mean by that?

I mean you're talking about lines.

We now have a system that's going to prevent lines.

We have early voting for weeks before Election Day.

Counting can start earlier.

What are you talking about?

The system might fail.

I'll give you an example.

Let's say that in Detroit, say one 1/10 of the voters who decide to vote are not registered at the right address and they just decide late to vote.

So let's say 20,000 people show up to vote on Election Day or the two or three days before that.

And there are only a couple of early voting sites in Detroit.

I don't know how many there will be.

Maybe there'll be five or ten, but let's just say there aren't enough of them.

There's no place to park.

There's no there's no way to stage lines.

Let's say the weather's bad.

There may not be adequate staffing.

I mean, we've seen this, as I said, in the year 2000.

I saw this in East Lansing.

The system simply collapsed.

But they didn't have early voting then.

Right.

They didn't have early voting, which made it worse.

Right.

I mean, there's say that the current system, they had different problems than we have today.

You had to be registered to vote at the time.

So at least there was that restriction.

Now, anybody who is just living in Detroit or living in East Lansing or living in Ann Arbor can vote who just decides, wakes up on Election Day and says, Can I vote?

And the answer is yes.

If you've lived here for at least 30 days, you can vote.

And so you go to the early voting site.

And if it happens that we don't anticipate the right number and we don't have it's not just staffing, but is there space?

Yeah.

Is there enough space?

Is there enough parking?

What's the weather like?

I mean, are you going to have thousands of people staged outdoors and a heavy rain?

You know, we just don't know.

What do you I mean, talking about Detroit here, obviously, in 2020, you know, Detroit was a focus nationally of claims made by the former president.

What are you fearful, I guess, that could potentially happen with this new system in a place like Detroit?

What would, I guess could hypothetically be potentially the worst case scenario with this new setup?

Well, that's what I was saying, that you could just get into a situation where they can process actually, Flint has has explored this in terribly painful detail, where they are able to process a certain number of ballots per hour and they simply have more voters than that.

And so the line gets longer and longer and longer after as after the polls have closed.

But I guess what I'm asking is what is I mean, if so, if the line gets longer, what is you know, are you saying that can be used for misinformation or are you saying that what I mean.

If you've got thousands of people who are forced to stand in line past midnight, many of whom are maybe not in great health, many of whom have responsibilities, many of whom have jobs and families, you're just have thousands of people who might have to abandon the vote.

I mean, just the possibility of that is extremely unlikely under the system that we've set up, though much, much more of our voting today is happening early and through absentee than in 2000.

You can't even.

Compare.

You know, if you could, we can tell the clerks what to do.

We can't really tell the voters what to do.

And the voters have a tendency to do things that are dumb at the collective level and they make perfect sense to them.

So you're saying that there's a possibility that there could be an extreme amount of people that show up right before polls close?

Uh these early voting states are not at the polls.

Oh, so you're talking about lines at early voting sites.

Because it's like nine days.

I'm sorry, you're talking about let's let's be clear.

We're not really talking about early voting here.

We're talking about Election Day registration.

Okay.

Election Day registrations are not cast to the polls, but at these early voting sites, okay, It's sort of like the last day of early voting.

So you're saying a huge number of unregistered people will show up at these sites?

They could.

Yeah, we saw that in 2022 in East Lansing.

With college students.

Yes.

And if that happened in the gubernatorial election, how many will do that in a presidential.

Mr.

Governor is a liberal Democrat.

Are you comfortable with Joe Biden on the top of the ticket?

Comfortable with grandpa?

It's you know, he's he's I'm sure I'm not talking.

These are not the talking points.

The Democratic Party, whatever condition he's in today, you have to wonder what condition he'll be in five years from now.

Well, what's the data telling you about where he's at right now?

Oh, you're talking about with the voters?

I'm really talking about.

Well, I'm his grandpa.

Is grandpa able to drive in five years?

Well, I mean, we're in the data that you have.

How is his chances right now?

Well, I think everybody's polling.

I don't I haven't done any polling, but everybody's polling shows it's about a dead heat.

Conceivably Trump has a small lead in Michigan.

My suspicion is and this is by looking at the presidential primary vote February 27th, my suspicion is that the Trump vote is a little bit overstated.

My suspicion is, yeah, my suspicion is that.

People are Getting tired.

Is Mr. Biden, is grandpa, who is Donald Trump?

Donald Trump, this is also politically incorrect is sort of the uncle with a bad drinking problem and the ugly temper who nobody will nobody invites to family events unless you have to.

And so based on that, if you analysis is correct and some would disagree, but based on that analysis, can you explain why people would vote for this gentleman.

In the first place, a lot of America feels like there's been much too much change.

And that's really the secret of the Republican Party these days, that there is way too much change and that that black people and homosexuals and women and every kind of group has been advanced and I'm just think about that 50 year old rather conservative, frankly, racist person who discovers that when we were kids, people told Polish jokes.

You tell a Polish joke today, you get referred to H.R., right?

You look on TV and there are gays on TV.

There's a black guy was president.

There are people who just really object to this much change in society.

And that is this the core of the Republican Party today.

It's this grievance about change.

And, you know, frankly, the world is changing much faster than it did 50 years ago or 100 years ago.

And so we're developing kind of like an increasing wave, people who just are resentful.

And Trump really speaks to that resentment.

That's that's the secret of the Republican vote today.

Real quickly, Mr. Grebner.

I guess I wanted to ask you about Democrats are really pushing the message of abortion and reproductive health, hoping to kind of capitalize on this again in 2024 as they did in 2022.

Michigan now as a constitutional amendment providing for the right to an abortion.

So I guess I understand you haven't done you're pulling out four for 24, but what kind of message can Democrats even relate to the average Michigander, and how receptive do you think that could be, considering we do have legalized abortion in the state?

Well, for for people particularly women who are concerned about abortion rights and personal autonomy and their ability to control their own lives and futures, the whole issue is important.

I don't know that it matters much if the Democrats push it.

I guess they have to keep reminding people.

I'll remember this issue, too.

The Republicans say, what about immigrants?

What about, you know, five or what about taxes?

And the Democrats say, what about what about abortion?

They're really just trying to refresh it in people's minds.

Quickly, Mr. Grebner, last word on that.

Is is this is the health issue going to be an important thing in November?

Moderately important, I think, yes.

Thank you, sir.

It's good to see you, Grandpa.

And the drunk uncle.

Okay.

Duly noted.

Thanks to our panel.

See everybody here.

For more Off the Record next week.

See you then.

Production of Off the Record is made possible, in part, by Martin Waymire, a full service strategic communications agency, partnering with clients through public relations, digital marketing and public policy engagement.

Learn more at MartinWaymire.com.

For more off the record, visit wkar.org.

Michigan public television stations have contributed to the production costs of Off the Record.