How Hillsdale Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot

A few days before Thanksgiving 2020, a half-dozen or so people gathered at the home of a Michigan lawyer named Robert E. Norton II.

Norton is the general counsel of Hillsdale College, a small, conservative Christian school in the southern part of the state. One of his guests was Ian Northon, a Hillsdale alumnus and private lawyer who did work for the college. Also in attendance were a couple of state lawmakers, Beth Griffin and Julie Alexander, who represented conservative districts north of Detroit.

Northon would later describe the meeting to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. “Somebody at Hillsdale reached out to me, said they are going to have this little meeting,” he testified. “I went to it. There were a handful of reps there, and then Giuliani called in.” That, of course, was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor turned personal lawyer to President Donald J. Trump.

“We don’t think that the laws have been followed, but we don’t know,” Northon recalled Giuliani saying over the speakerphone, then instructing the group to let the campaign know about any signs of election fraud they discovered. “He was not on the call for very long, and I don’t know if he knew that he was speaking to a group of legislators and lawyers in Michigan,” Northon said. “I got the sense that he was making a lot of calls around that time.”

Trump’s campaign to remain in power was already in full, if flailing, swing. Just hours after the final polls closed on election night, in a televised speech from the White House, the president declared the election “a fraud on the American public”; he and his allies proceeded to spread the lie of a rigged election on Fox News, on conservative