Wednesday, July 23

Seth Keshel, a prominent election denier and conspiracy theorist, recently joined a far-right Michigan voting group with ties to Cleta Mitchell, signalling that the Great Lakes State could be a hotbed for election lies in the 2026 midterms. Also in this week’s Eye On The Right: Expect President Donald Trump to double down on 2020 election conspiracies and voter fraud allegations to distract from the Epstein scandal. 

As always, thanks for reading. 

— Matt Cohen, Senior Reporter

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A Prominent Election Conspiracy Theorist Joins a Far-Right Michigan Voting Group

Last month, I reported in Eye On The Right that Seth Keshel — a former Army intelligence captain and MAGA diehard who has traveled the country spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — said he recently briefed an unnamed top White House staffer on “critical election research.”

Now Keshel is taking his election work to one of the most crucial swing states for the 2026 midterms: Michigan. 

Last week, the far-right local election group Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) announced that Keshel is joining the organization as a special advisor, with a focus on building out PIME’s “extensive community engagement program” launched last year “to reach out to underserved segments of the voting community, encouraging their civic participation.”

You may not have heard of PIME before, but for Keshel to join this group in an advisory role piques my interest for several reasons. Let me break it down. 

It’s no secret that 2020 election denialism lingers in MAGA world – especially as Trump continues to fan the flames of voting conspiracies — but the problem is especially bad in Michigan. After Republicans gained control of the state House of Representatives in the 2024 election, they appointed a prominent election denier to chair the election committee, where she’s used the position to investigate conspiracy theories and false claims of fraud in the 2020 and 2022 elections and target Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), who’s running for governor. 

Michigan has also seen efforts by right-wing officials on election boards to use control of the certification process to spread more lies about voting irregularities.

It’s all setting the stage to sow more election denialism for the 2026 midterms, from a legislative standpoint.

And that’s where a group like PIME comes in.

If the language around PIME’s stated goals — fair and transparent elections, strict voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls — sounds familiar, it should: PIME’s founder and chair is Patrice Johnson, a close ally of anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who played a key role in President Donald Trump’s failed bid to overturn 2020. Specifically, Johnson is a top Michigan leader of Mitchell’s vast Election Integrity Network — the nationwide anti-voting coalition Mitchell spearheaded to push voter suppression efforts on the state and local level. 

I’ve been following Keshel’s work for a while. His whole thing is he goes where he thinks there’s going to be voter fraud (even though, as it’s been proven time and time again, voter fraud is exceedingly rare). And so while I don’t exactly take his work seriously, I do pay attention to where he’s paying attention. Because he tends to attract controversy.

So when someone like Keshel — a well-known election denier with direct ties to the White House — joins the Mitchell-linked PIME, that signals to me that Michigan is poised to be another hotbed of election conspiracy theories as we head into the midterm election season.

Expect Trump to Double Down on Election Conspiracies to Distract From Epstein

Speaking of Keshel, I was intrigued to read him weigh in on a surprising subject recently: the Epstein scandal. 

“I’m an elections and data guy,” Keshel recently wrote. “I try to stick to my field of proven expertise and will sometimes branch into tactical, operational, strategic, or cultural topics in this newsletter.”  

But Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice’s mishandling of the Epstein files has been so disastrous that even people like Keshel are reluctantly weighing in — and it’s becoming a litmus test for how loyal they are to the president.

With the DOJ’s fumbling of the Epstein files causing a rift in the MAGA world, Trump is doing everything he can to distract his base from the scandal — including doubling down on 2020 election conspiracies. 

“Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump recently posted in a deranged rant on TruthSocial.

We can most certainly expect much more of this from Trump in the coming weeks, but what I’m really interested in is how this will play out among the election denial groups and conspiracy theorists, who Trump will want to have his back as he ramps up voter fraud claims to deflect from Epstein in the coming weeks. 

It seems as though the election denier community is sticking with Trump through all this — so far. 

“I am a strong supporter of President Trump,” Keshel wrote. “There can be no doubt of that, and my articles in this newsletter have not been of the negative variety even when others are letting them fly. It has usually turned out that President Trump has been on the right side of the ledger once all dust settles… I believe there must be a valid explanation for the pandemonium, confusion, and unrest among the commentariat and for the frustrated expressions from the Commander in Chief himself.” 

Mitchell even weighed in recently on X, claiming that what’s happening to Tina Peters — the former GOP local election clerk in Colorado who was sentenced to prison for her role in a voting system data breach — is “way worse than the darned Epstein files.”

But not everyone is on Team Trump. Tom Fitton, the president of the right-wing legal group Judicial Watch, recently went on Steve Bannon’s podcast to demand answers from Trump’s DOJ about the Epstein memo, threatening a lawsuit to get to the bottom of the saga.

“This unsigned memo dismissing Americans’ concerns about Epstein is strange,” he said. “They say we don’t know what we’re talking about because of secret evidence they won’t share. We’re going to keep litigating until the truth comes out.”