Nessel Found In Contempt Of House Oversight Panel

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 12/16/2025) Attorney General Dana Nessel committed, at a minimum, a “clear ethics violation” when she involved herself in possible criminal cases involving a personal friend and her spouse, House Oversight Committee Chair Jay DeBoyer (R-Clay) said Tuesday. Nessel's perceived unwillingness to fully participate in the investigation led a House panel to find her in contempt, a vote that fell on party lines.

Nessel claims a clear firewall shielded her participation in the investigation into Traci Kormak, a former member of Nessel's transition team who is suspected of bilking money from an elderly, vulnerable adult, and Bipartisan Solutions, which gave secret money to a ballot proposal committee co-chaired by her spouse.

However, DeBoyer claims evidence shared at his House Oversight Committee by the House Republicans' legal team Tuesday during its three-hour hearing showed otherwise.

“The facts at this point, on face value, demonstrate that the power of her office was used to influence the direction of potential criminal cases,” DeBoyer said. “The evidence says that Dana Nessel, on multiple occasions, in multiple cases, violated her ethical expectation.”

Nessel declined to appear before the House Oversight Committee. She said a conflict wall prevented her from having any knowledge about either case. The AG's office says she offered up the relevant division chiefs with direct knowledge of the investigations in question to appear before the committee. DeBoyer declined that invitation.

Instead, they presented conclusions from their own staff, based on their “selective review of documents” provided by the AG's office earlier this year, said Kimberly Bush, the AG's director of public information. She added that many documents have been publicly available for more than two years.

The panel voted to give DeBoyer the power to subpoena both the Attorney General's office and the Department of Health and Human Services for more information on the Kornak and Bipartisan Solutions cases. DeBoyer is concerned that too many of the records the Attorney General sent were redacted.

“Provide us with what those sentences say with clarity,” he said. “Maybe there's nothing to see here. I would argue otherwise based on the rest of the facts.”

During the Oversight Committee meeting, Rep. Brad Paquette (R-Niles) said he found it to be an impeachable offense that Nessel (in the words of Rep. Jason Woolford (R-Howell)) “man-handled a staffer” to make the case against Kornak go away, according to an email written after the firewall was established.

Asked what he thought about impeachment by reporters, DeBoyer said, “It would be a disservice to my position to say that that's not on the table.” He said he'd wait to see what the new documents produce before going further down that road.

The first case involves Kornak, who was the conservator of Rosalene Burd, who lived in a Grand Rapids senior living home called Heather Hills. Kornak apparently stole as much as $100,000 from Burd, until the former CEO of the facility blew the whistle on the activity to the Attorney General and investigative journalist Charlie LeDuff.

The evidence shared with the House Republican legal team point to Nessel taking at least six weeks too long to create the necessary firewall and then stepping over the firewall to kill the investigation.

The Attorney General's Office noted, however, that the Kornak investigation ended after the alleged “whistleblower,” former Heather Hills CEO Joe LeBlanc, rejected any attempt to work with their office. Nessel's communications with anyone in her office about the case happened after the investigation was fully completed, which did not violate any ethical rules, Bush said.

The House Republicans were using the point at which a file was “closed,” which is long after the AG's office had stopped working on it.

In the second case, the Secretary of State was concerned enough that Bipartisan Solutions had committed a campaign finance act violation in raising money for Fair and Equal Michigan that it referred the case to the Attorney General for possible prosecution. Instead, the Attorney General sent the case back to the Secretary of State.

The Attorney General's office responded that neither Nessel nor Nessel's wife, Alanna Maguire, had anything to do with Bipartisan Solutions, which was the entity in which the complaint was filed against. Maguire had been the co-chair for Fair and Equal Michigan for a time in 2020. For that reason, no conflict wall had been created in the case.

The case was sent back to the Secretary of State because it hadn't completed some of its process for resolving complaints first.

“The Attorney General and the State agency under her leadership has been generously cooperative with the demands of the House Oversight Committee and refutes their contention that her conduct has been contemptuous,” Bush said.

Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou (D-East Lansing) pointed out during committee that if DeBoyer or anyone else believes that Nessel violated any ethical rules, they should file an ethics complaint with the State Bar of Michigan.

“If their goal was to preserve the integrity of the system and the law in Michigan, that would have been the appropriate step,” said Tsernoglou, an attorney by trade. “Presenting it to a political committee is just politics, and nothing more than that.”

“A lot of what we do in that committee is political theater, attacking the Democratic statewide electeds, namely Jocelyn Benson and Dana Nessel, and that's what we saw today."

Tsernoglou added that a lot of the committee was spent talking about the alleged illegal actions of a private citizen against another. Tsernoglou said what she heard Tuesday was “awful," but this is a matter for the Kent County Prosecutor, not a legislative oversight committee.