In an interview transcript obtained by the New York Times, one of the 16 Michigan Republicans to be charged with signing false Electoral College votes and the only so far to reach a cooperation agreement with Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, told prosecutors he felt “betrayed” by the others who had talked him into filling in at the last minute for a would-be elector who dropped out.

“I can’t overemphasize how once I read the information in the J6 transcripts how upset I was that the legitimate process had not been followed,” James Renner said in the interview. “I felt that I had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in. I was accepting the individuals that were in authority [knew] what they were talking about.” Renner said he began looking into the January 6th Select Committee transcripts after he and the other 15 had been sued earlier this year. “It was only then that I realized that, hold it, there is an official state authorized process for this… I had never been an elector, I had never discussed it with anybody. I was used to a much more informal process at the county level. And so that’s when I became suspicious of what had gone on,” he said, adding that he later realized “what happened was not legitimate.”

Renner, a 77 year-old retired state trooper, is so far the only fake Michigan elector to have had the charges dropped against him for cooperating with prosecutors. The Times’s reporting mentions that at a recent pretrial hearing that a former Michigan GOP official had drafted language to specify that the electors were signing only on a contingent basis – the qualifier that their counterparts in Pennsylvania and New Mexico added and as such have almost certainly saved their own asses – but that official had been sidelined by a COVID infection that day.