Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is facing a malicious prosecution lawsuit following his failed bid to convict a Prince William County election official of election fraud.
Miyares dropped the charges against Prince William County registrar Michele White in 2023. His office, as part of a new election integrity unit, claimed the 20-year-veteran of Virginia elections doctored records to add votes for former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election.
But according to a new civil rights lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday, Miyares was more interested in politics than the law.
Corey Stoughton is an attorney with the New York law firm Selendy Gay who's repping White. She said Miyares ginned up the charges to legitimize conspiracies about the 2020 election.
“And if that meant lying, misrepresenting facts, omitting important information when they went to the grand jury and violating every code of ethics that governs prosecutions and the exercise of that incredible power, then so be it,” Stoughton said in an interview with Radio IQ.
According to Stoughton the criminal charges were based on normal election officer work, correcting votes that were manually entered incorrectly at first. The Covid-19 pandemic had already complicated the election, and the data entry error was related to absentee ballots in split precincts. Evidence of the change was made in the Department of Elections change log, a publicly available database of election corrections.
But Stoughton said Miyares never entered the change log into the grand jury record as it would have undermined his case.
Stoughton said White is pursuing the lawsuit to stand up for others like her who’ve faced an onslaught of abuse in the last 8 years.
“The lawsuit, and Michelle really feels strongly about this, is really about standing up for election workers and sending a signal to people who would attack them when they’re doing nothing but trying their hardest under challenging circumstances to protect our democratic processes,” she said.
In a statement, the Attorney General’s office said the lawsuit is "wrong on the facts and the law.”
When the charges against White were dropped, Miyares office referred comment to his court filing.
Those documents said Sean Mulligan, a witness for the prosecution who worked in the Prince William County elections office under White, had "conveniently and quite surprisingly provided a different version of events from that which he had previously provided to investigators.”
But White's defense attorney at the time, Zach Stafford of Lawrence, Smith & Gardner, told InsideNOVA Mulligan's story never changed, nor did he allege any misconduct.
"The language from the Attorney General’s motion … that speculated Mr. Mulligan’s change in statement was ‘convenient’ is not based on any suspicion or evidence of witness tampering but merely a poor choice of words," Stafford told reporters last December.
Miyares will likely seek immunity as a state official, a bar that may be hard for White to clear; even Stoughton admitted she hadn’t heard of Virginia’s attorney general facing such claims in the past.
"We're in uncharted territory, but the actions are uncharted territory," she said. "If law doesn't provide a remedy for this kind abuse of power, we need to have a new way of looking at the law."
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
