MANASSAS, Va. (CN) — More than a year after the high-profile indictment of a county election official on corruption charges, the Virginia Attorney General’s Office on Wednesday dropped the final charge in the case.
During a brief hearing, Judge Carroll A. Weimer Jr. granted a motion to end the case against Michele White, formerly registrar for Prince William County, a populous Washington suburb. She left the courtroom in silence, walking briskly away from the county judicial center.
Charges against White initially included two felonies, corrupt conduct and making a false statement regarding an election, along with a misdemeanor count of neglect of duty by an elections officer. The attorney general’s office dropped the felony charges against her in December.
In court filings, James R. Herring, assistant attorney general, explained that a key witness, Sean Mulligan, “conveniently and quite surprisingly provided a different version of events from that which he had previously provided to investigators.”
The word "conveniently" concerned the judge. “I took it to mean there had been some, for lack of a better word, shenanigans,” Weimer said, and suggested Herring was implying White had something to do with changed story.
Herring said he was not implying that.
White's attorney, Zachary Stafford of the firm Lawrence, Smith and Gardner, said Mulligan, who served as assistant registrar, never changed his story. Rather, investigators failed to properly vet the witness. He explained that the most concerning charge against White involved altering election results in VERIS (Virginia Election and Registration Information System) on Nov. 7, 2020, with incorrect numbers for the central absentee precinct. That charge was subsequently disproven, Stafford said.
"I spoke to Sean Mulligan after he was interviewed by the attorney general’s office during their trial preparations this past week," Stafford wrote in a statement after the hearing. "When I interviewed Mr. Mulligan he did not provide me an inconsistent statement compared to what he had previously stated to an investigator for the attorney general prior to Ms. White’s indictment, but rather filled in a hole that the initial investigation did not address — whether Ms. White told him to make the changes in VERIS that were recorded on Nov. 7, 2020."
Mulligan stated that White did not tell him to make those changes, Stafford recounted. "He could not recall who told him to make the changes on Nov. 7, but suspected it was one of two co-workers that were handling the results from the central absentee precinct."
Every aspect of White’s performance during the 2020 election was examined, the attorney added. "White did not commit any crimes during her tenure as registrar in Prince William County, and the attorney general’s office wisely dropped the charges."
The White case surfaced as former President Donald Trump has continued to claim that the 2020 election was rigged. And days after White’s Sept. 6, 2022, indictment, Herring’s boss, Attorney General Jason Miyares, announced the creation in his office of an Election Integrity Unit.
"A prosecutor’s ethical duty is not only to seek convictions but to pursue justice based upon the facts and evidence available," remarked Miyares spokeswoman Victoria LaCivita in an email exchange. "As we said today in our motion, in preparation for trial we learned that several of the witnesses interviewed unexpectedly changed their statements. This case was heavily dependent upon witness testimony and the inconsistencies in these witness statements forced us to reluctantly withdraw the charges. "
The case took a toll on White, who started a GoFundMe page to ask for contributions for her defense. The process was traumatic, Stafford said. "It’s a nightmare to go through something like this," he said. "She was a government employee."
While some lawmakers claim that fraudulent votes delegitimized presidential and midterm elections, “research shows that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent,” concluded a report by the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Even a study commissioned by the Donald Trump campaign said that “most allegations of voter fraud are due to voter mistakes, clerical error and bad data-matching practices.”
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