Truth Squad first addressed this issue in January, concluding then that the police chief had failed to substantiate his allegation that Whitmer was reluctant to address the assault cases. Truth Squad wrote then:

While Dunlap appears to portray Whitmer as a dithering bureaucrat, the available evidence suggests something else entirely: a prosecutor who put the interests of justice and sexual assault victims ahead of her own political ambitions by allowing the attorney general to spearhead the cases rather than seeking to prosecute through her own office.

Today, the facts surrounding Whitmer’s role in the decision to prosecute remain about as cloudy as they did in January. Notes, if they exist, from the disputed October 2016 meeting, in which top officials from both agencies discussed the prosecution strategy, have not been publicly released.

Dunlap, the police chief, has declined to provide additional evidence to support his remarks last December. Schuette, meanwhile, mocks Whitmer’s explanation for deferring to the Attorney General’s office. But when Schuette first agreed to review the matter, his own office put out a press release declaring that the emergence of victims from multiple jurisdictions put his office “in the best position to effectively investigate and prosecute this case.” Meanwhile, Dunlap’s email correspondence with Whitmer’s office from October 2016 also cited multiple venues as a factor in taking the case to the state.

At first blush, Rachael Denhollander’s Facebook post seemed to add a new dimension to the dispute. Denhollander, an attorney who in June appeared in a campaign ad for Schuette’s then-Republican rival for governor, Lt. Gov. Brian Calley, said she had knowledge, including firsthand, of how decisions were made during the investigation.

She states as fact that Chief Dunlap went to the Attorney General “only after [emphasis hers] the determination by the Ingham County office to not pursue charges for any sexual assault.”

But Denhollander did not attend the Oct. 4, 2016, meeting between MSU police, the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office and the FBI, according to a list of attendees provided by the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office. So any knowledge she has of that pivotal meeting comes from the police officials who worked on the case and attended the meeting, not from being there herself, as she herself concedes in her statement.

Denhollander declined to elaborate on her statement to Truth Squad.