In rural Michigan, county Sheriff Dar Leaf has teamed with a Trump-camp lawyer to chase the former president’s outlandish rigged-election theories. A member of a radical group of “constitutional sheriffs,” he’s now under investigation himself.

HASTINGS, Michigan

Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged has been decisively debunked by local election officials, state and federal courts, and the former president’s own attorney general. All deemed his case bogus.

Here in Michigan’s rural Barry County, Sheriff Dar Leaf rejects all that.

Since late 2020, Leaf has been investigating one of Trump’s most fantastical false assertions – that vote-counting machines somehow flipped votes from Trump to Democrat Joe Biden. Working with key figures in the former president’s failed effort to overturn the election, the Republican sheriff has petitioned courts seeking to seize election equipment, assigned investigators to grill local clerks about balloting processes and made sweeping requests for their records. The sheriff is barreling ahead despite the conclusions of judges and the county’s Republican prosecutor that he lacked probable cause.

In the process, Leaf is roiling conservative Barry County, where Trump won decisively, and testing a legal theory with revolutionary implications for American democracy.

Leaf is in the vanguard of the so-called “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which asserts that sheriffs, typically elected in counties, possess supreme law-enforcement...

Read Full Story: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-elections-michigan-in...