We here at Daily Kos are irritatingly familiar with the goings-on of the "Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officer Association," the Richard Mack-led hive of anti-government conspiracy theories that all vaguely revolves around a central premise declaring local sheriffs—as opposed to all other elected officials—are the true arbiters of what the Constitution does or doesn't allow. It's not Congress, and it's not the Supreme Court, you silly goose.
It's Some Guy, duly elected sheriff of Spittake County, who determines whether you have to pay taxes or abide by federal firearms laws or kidnap your state governor because they made you miss a hair appointment. Want your own meth lab? Hey, talk to your local sheriff, because drug laws ain't the boss of you. The law is whatever Sheriff Someguy says it is on any given day, and maybe if you don't donate to the next law enforcement meet-up, it'll be something else tomorrow.
These people get on television, mind you. Richard Mack, David "Bling" Clarke, and the others are invited onto the teevees to provide "analysis" of various national ills, and hosts go out of their way to make them seem vaguely hinged. But I'm not sure if we knew this one: Talking Points Memo reports that one of these self-proclaimed "constitutional" sheriffs, Barry County, Michigan Sheriff Dar Leaf, actually got his hands on a ballot tabulation machine last year in the wake of conservative conspiracy theories insisting that Donald Trump only lost reelection because of "rigged" voting machines.
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Leaf had previously attempted to get courts to allow him to impound voting machines, but Leaf didn't have a shred of evidence to justify it, and the court told him to take a hike. After the court refused to go along, reports TPM, Leaf sent "a deputy and a private investigator" to township election clerks throughout the county, questioning and attempting to bully them into surrendering equipment. One clerk allowed them to take a Dominion ballot tabulator for inspection; Leaf's team (or somebody) allegedly took the machine to Detroit and disassembled it.
By "disassembled," we effectively mean "destroyed." The machine's security seal was broken, revealing the machine had been tampered with. And rather than being, say, thrown out of office for a plot to improperly tamper with voting machines, Leaf is now filing another lawsuit claiming that it's other state officials who are interfering with his authority to hunt for fraud that neither he nor anybody else can find.
Oh, it's not going to get an inch in court, mind you. But bizarrely, this paranoid and batshit conspiracy theorist continues to hold office. That's despite Sheriff Leaf palling around with everyone from the Constitutional Sheriff's group to Pillowman Mike Lindell to election hoax promotion machine, Sidney Powell.
And if the name Dar Leaf rings a bell for you, that's because this particular Michigan has a history. Leaf earned national attention when a militia kidnapping plot targeting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was foiled, but produced footage of Leaf speaking onstage at an anti-Whitmer rally shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the militia thugs arrested for their roles in the plot.
Leaf was putting the "constitutional sheriff" theory that his decisions trumped all other government regulations into practice, during that rally. He specifically praised a local barber who defied pandemic lockdown orders as a "little version of Rosa Parks," encouraging other Michigan citizens to defy pandemic orders.
Undeterred, Leaf later responded to questions about the kidnapping plot by suggesting to a reporter that the militia had the right to attempt a citizen's arrest of Whitmer.
We can say, then, that the rule of law in Barry County, Michigan is spotty at best. Whether you're allowed to kidnap a sitting governor because you're mad about hair salon appointment cancellations during a national emergency is something still up for debate, and if you find that the courts aren't willing to entertain your requests to impound election equipment because you're pissy about the outcome and/or don't think the vibes are right then you can send a few underlings from town to town to demand that they turn over the equipment anyway. After all, Sidney Powell and the guy who makes pillows both think that, uh, Italian satellites might have space-lasered the vote totals on behalf of Dead Hugo Chavez, and if the local sheriff thinks that every court in the land, every election official, every election expert and anyone else you can name are all wrong, dead wrong, in insisting that never happened then buckle up, because it's sheriffin' time.
All right, so the voters probably have to pay for another destroyed vote tabulator. Fine. Republicans have been tampering with voting equipment all across the nation, with new subpoenas issued in Georgia over another tampering case on Wednesday—in that case, conspiracy theorists were given improper access to a server and were able to copy its contents in a rather stunning case of outright Republican corruption. The idea that anyone witless enough to believe Trumpian conspiracy theories about Italian satellites or dead Venezuelan leaders has the forensic chops to find out anything about a voting machine by unscrewing some parts and examining it for silverfish and/or bamboo is pretty laughable all on its own, but that's almost beside the point.
The bigger issue here seems to be that Barry County, Michigan, is in the apparently-permanent thrall of a far-right terrorist sympathizer whose interpretation of the law consists solely of what he and the last three Facebook posts he's read feel like.
What's up with that, Barry County? I realize in a nearly all-white, all-Republican county now known more for terrorism than tourism you're going to get quite the list of characters for local office, but if your local law enforcement guy is now nationally known for both his ties to an attempted terrorist act and, now, for tampering with voting equipment, don't you think it might be time to turn the post over to a particularly photogenic dog?
There are a lot of ways for a county to be famous, and the rest of us are questioning your life choices. And that's an understatement.
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