Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s LGBTQ+ activism is causing problems for the Michigan Attorney General’s Office.

Nearly six months ago, Assistant Attorney General Alexandria Peterson sought a warrant in Wayne County Circuit Court to charge Hamtramck city council members with cheating in the city’s 2023 city council race.

Yet despite Hamtramck City Clerk Rana Faraj’s pleas for Nessel’s office to “take action” on what she describes as “clear evidence of suspicious activities” captured on video in 2023, there’s been no charges, and no clear explanation from the AG on why until Wednesday.

That’s when Danny Wimmer, Nessel’s spokesman, revealed to the The Detroit News the delay is due to the AG’s pending request for a special prosecutor to review the allegations and evidence.

“This department investigated these allegations for months and, at the conclusion of our initial investigation, determined another agency should make the charging decisions,” he said.

The reason why is where Nessel’s activism for the LGBTQ+ community is colliding into her obligations as attorney general.

Wimmer noted Nessel “had personally appeared at public protests against the anti-LGBTQ policies of the Hamtramck City Council in 2023” and linked the potential conflict of interest to “perceptions of bias” Nessel faced after filing charges against pro-Palestinian protestors at the University of Michigan last year.

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The revelation comes about three weeks after Faraj sent a letter to Nessel to express concerns about “reports that the investigator assigned to this matter by the Attorney General’s Office has been removed from the investigation, not because he has failed to uncover evidence of criminal activity, but precisely because he has.”

“The members of this office and other city employees that gave interviews and cooperation are left to wonder whether it was all a waste of our small city’s very scarce resources to offer such cooperation,” Faraj wrote.

“My priority is fair, transparent elections. I’ve raised my concerns clearly, and now it’s up to the authorities to step up and ensure accountability,” Faraj said in a statement to The News. “Our community deserves nothing less.”

The case centers on voting irregularities in the 2023 election for three Hamtramck City Council seats, which resulted in alleged violations of election laws by Democratic councilmen Mohammed Hassan and Muhtasin Sadman, who were both elected that year, the Detroit Free Press reports.

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Hassan, who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, “continues to act as though he’s above the law, openly bragging that no one can touch him,” Faraj wrote.

Assistant AG Peterson requested two charges of absentee ballot tampering and two counts of impersonating another to vote for Hassan, and a charge of impersonating a voter and two charges of inducing unqualified voters to apply for absentee ballots for Sadman.

Other charges were also requested for another Hamtramck man who was not elected, according to Wayne County Court records.

Video from City Hall showed “multiple instances of large batches of absentee ballots being dropped into boxes at once, strongly suggesting a single individual rather than multiple legitimate voters,” Faraj wrote to Nessel.

Hassan, who led the city’s efforts to ban gay pride flags, worked to counter a shift toward President Donald Trump among voters in the Muslim-majority city in 2024, professing his support for Harris after Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib endorsed Trump, according to the Washington Examiner.

Faraj wrote that she’s concerned the fraud may resurface in 2025 with races for three city council seats and the mayor’s post. Ghalib was named by Trump to serve as ambassador to Kuwait and is awaiting conformation by the U.S. Senate.

Ghalib recently suggested confirmation by the Senate is “not guaranteed” and vowed to run for re-election if that doesn’t happen, The Detroit News reports.

In February, Hassan announced he’s running for mayor and has taunted Ghalib at city council meetings, prompting a terse response from the mayor, according to The Hamtramck Review.

“You will lose,” Ghalib told Hassan.