Sunshine Week Lowlight: Dana Nessel
Lansing, MI – To wrap up our Michigan highlights and lowlights this Sunshine Week, we have Attorney General Dana Nessel, who has made a career of obfuscating her unethical behavior. Between her donor-funded Caribbean vacations, using her office to protect her wife, and her efforts to cover up the abuse of an elderly woman, Nessel’s tenure as a public official perfectly illustrates why Sunshine Week exists in the first place.
Despite branding herself as an average Michigander, Nessel certainly has a taste for the luxurious. In 2023, a law firm paid tens of thousands of dollars for the attorney general and her wife to spend almost a week in Turks and Caicos. One of the firm's lawyers, Kelly Neuman, had previously donated more than $7,000 to Nessel’s campaign.
Some might say that law firms paying for an attorney general’s lavish stays at the Ritz-Carlton is a conflict of interest, but Nessel apparently disagrees.
Conflicts of interest may as well be Dana Nessel’s mantra, though. In 2023, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office concluded that a Democrat dark money group likely broke campaign finance law and referred the case to the attorney general’s office. That group, Bipartisan Solutions, made up 78% of all donations to a ballot committee chaired by Dana Nessel’s wife.
Nessel’s office never pursued a case against Bipartisan Solutions for those violations.
Finally, Nessel jumped a firewall to protect the former treasurer of the Michigan Democrat Party, who allegedly spent years stealing from an elderly woman in her care. Charges were filed earlier this year in Kent County against Traci Kornak, a member of then Attorney General-Elect Nessel’s transition team, for embezzlement from a vulnerable adult. When the case was presented to Nessel years ago, she recommended no charges and closed the investigation.
“Dana Nessel could be an Olympic athlete with how much time she’s spent jumping over, racing around, and plowing through firewalls,” said Gabe Butzke, a spokesperson for Michigan Forward Network. “For seven years, she has used her office to the benefit of her friends and family, at the expense of Michiganders. Time and again, the message from Nessel has been ‘we are above the law.”
