A few months after Election Day 2020, a sheriff’s deputy and a second man walked into the Rutland Charter Township clerk’s office in southwest Michigan. Dressed in plainclothes, the man identified himself as a private detective and said he was conducting a criminal investigation into electoral fraud, NBC News reported.

“It was kind of a shock,” recalled the clerk, Robin Hawthorne. “I didn’t have any discrepancy. I walked past the canvas, so it was like, ‘What are they doing here?'”

Hawthorne is Republican in a solidly red town of 4,100. She had been Rutland Charter’s clerk since 2001 and had never encountered anything like this.

Hawthorne answered the private investigator’s questions, she said, while the deputy recorded the conversation on his phone. But when they asked to see her vote counting machines, she was adamant.

You can look at them, he remembered telling the men, but you can’t touch anything.

They got up to leave instead. But before doing so, Hawthorne said, they insisted they not mention their visit to anyone to protect the investigation.

“I was like bull shit,” she said. “You’re not going to come here, rush me like that, and I’m not going to find out what’s going on.”

She soon learned that the deputy and the private investigator had visited other offices in the city as part of an effort to find evidence of voter fraud. And the man responsible for it was the top lawman in the area – County Sheriff Barry Dar Leaf.

Leaf styles himself as a “constitutional sheriff.” Sheriffs like him see themselves as holding the ultimate authority in their counties, overriding that of state and federal law enforcement officials. They have become prominent figures in the election denial movement and, according to critics, among the most dangerous. “Constitutional sheriffs” think they have the authority confiscate the voting machinesassembles armed troops to patrol near polling stations and refuses to enforce any law it deems unconstitutional.

“This is vigilantism hiding behind a badge,” said Matt Sanderson, a Washington election lawyer. “No official in this country has unchecked power, and it is absurd to say that a local sheriff of all people would have a constitutional superpower to disregard the courts and the law in pursuit of an extralegal agenda.”

Even though efforts to prove election fraud in 2020 have failed, constitutional sheriffs have grown in stature in recent years. Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI deputy director for counterintelligence, said he fears the possibility of one of those sheriffs meddling in the election process in a pivotal state like Michigan or Wisconsin.

“The worst-case scenario is in a key swing state, one of these knot-headed sheriffs tries, and somehow succeeds, to seize the ballots or stop the voting process,” Figliuzzi said. “That allows Trump to claim victory and then their trained militia members to do who knows what.”

Leaf did not respond to phone or email messages seeking comment.

Trump’s World Celebrities

It is hard to say how many constitutional sheriffs there are in the US. The most prominent group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, was founded in 2011 by Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff and member of the Oath Keepers militia. He claimed that 10 percent of the nation’s 3,000 sheriffs are members, along with 10,000 ordinary citizens.

The group held a conference in Las Vegas last May, attracting a crowd of current and former sheriffs, as well as election-denying Trump-world celebrities like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Mack gave a speech in which he called federal and state agencies “America’s Gestapo” and said “the sheriffs are going to have to stop this.”

The 2020 election has become a focal point. Several sheriffs aligned with Mack, including Chris Schmaling of Racine County, Wis., and Calvin Hayden of Johnson County, Kansas, have trumpeted their ongoing investigations into voter fraud.

“I have a cyber guy,” Hayden said at a conference in 2022, according to Associated Press. “I sent him to start assessing what’s going on with the machines.”

But perhaps no sheriff in Mack’s group has garnered as much attention as Michigan’s Dar Leaf.

Elected in 2003, Leaf first made national headlines a month before the 2020 election when he analyzed the actions of 13 men charged with kidnapping plot Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

“A lot of people are mad at the governor and want her arrested,” Leaf said Fox 17 News in Grand Rapids. “So were they trying to make an arrest or was it an attempted kidnapping? Because you still can, in Michigan, if it’s a felony, you can make a criminal arrest.”

The 2020 election was a pivotal moment for Leaf. After Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump claimed without evidence that the election was rigged against him.

In Leaf and other members of the constitutional sheriffs movement, Trump has drawn allies willing to take action. Leaf worked with Stefanie Lambert, a Detroit attorney who was part of the Trump team led by Sidney Powell, a conspiracy theory attorney who filed several frivolous lawsuits alleging widespread voter fraud and fraudulent machines that reversed the votes from Trump to Biden.

Leaf took legal action on her own in early December 2020, seeking an emergency injunction to prevent local officials from deleting certain election records as is standard procedure. The chief judge in federal court in Grand Rapids denied the request in a sweeping order.

Leaf and his co-plaintiffs “invite the court to make speculative leaps to a vague and nebulous conclusion that there have been numerous instances of voter fraud and that the defendants are destroying evidence,” the judge wrote. “There is simply nothing on record to infer that much.”

Around this time, Doug Van Essen, a Grand Rapids attorney, said he received a call from a sheriff in a nearby county with a pointed question: “Would you get Dar off your back?”

The sheriff said Leaf wanted him to talk to an Army colonel who allegedly had evidence of voter fraud in one of the reddest counties in the state. Van Essen said he agreed to call the colonel and then found himself listening to a man shouting nonsense.

Biden got 40 percent more votes than Barack Obama in the 2008 election, the colonel said, according to Van Essen.

“That was true,” Van Essen said. “But this was the fastest growing county in Michigan, and Trump got 40 percent more votes than (John) McCain. It was the same percentage.”

“This is the type of so-called evidence they had,” added Van Essen, who considers himself a traditional Republican and Leaf “an embarrassment.”

Good guys

In early 2021, Deputy Leaf and the private investigator went to Hawthorne’s office in Rutland Charter Township. Trump beat Biden in Barry County, gathered 65% of the votesbut lost the state of Michigan by 154,000 votes.

Leaf’s deputy and private investigator wiretapped several officials and managed to get hold of a voting machine, according to local reports and Michigan Attorney General’s Office. He also sought warrants to seize voting tabulators in Barry County and Woodlawn Township, according to the documents. obtained by Reuters.

Leaf began presenting his investigation into voter fraud at public events, drawing cheers and applause. He claimed that “Serbian foreigners” remote voting machines in Michigan, and other times this The Venezuelans had programmed the machines to groan

For Hawthorne, it brought only headaches and consternation.

“It caused quite a stir in Barry County,” Hawthorne said. “It’s sad to see that people don’t trust me to do my job. This is a sacred duty of mine and I take it seriously.”

to a July 2021 eventLeaf said he launched the investigation after a retired sergeant in his office came to him with “some documentation” from “the MyPillow guy” — Lindell, an outspoken election denier and conspiracy theorist.

Leaf added that the voter fraud investigation was “the biggest task we’ve had right now.”

“I hope other sheriffs will catch on, get a backbone and do their own investigations,” he said.

Leaf’s has been going on for four years, but has yet to produce clear evidence of fraud or wrongdoing. In a twist, the sheriff and his associates were investigated by the state attorney general for their role in a Michigan voting machine hacking plot. In August 2023, three people were charged in the scheme — including Lambert, with whom Trump team lawyer Leaf worked — but not Leaf himself.

The special prosecutor who brought the case, DJ Hilson, said in a statement at the time the decision not to charge Leaf and others was based on an evaluation of the law and “a careful review of the totality of the evidence collected by investigators.”

Lambert, who has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial, said in an email that he had not broken the law. She described herself as a lawyer who started working for Leaf after the 2020 election.

Leaf, meanwhile, is still focused on unearthing election fraud from four years ago, but seems to have moved beyond Michigan. Just last week, he posted a note on his social media pages saying he had made “referrals for criminal investigation” to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

“He’s still out there, talking, talking, stirring up the masses,” said Hawthorne, the Rutland Charter official. “People come in here saying they’re sure the machines are flipping the vote.”

Hawthorne said early voting went smoothly, but she is concerned about the post-election period if Vice President Kamala Harris is declared the winner.

“There’s a lot of good guys around here who think what happened on Jan. 6 was great,” Hawthorne said.

The veteran official said she hopes things stay calm in her little corner of Michigan. But one thing’s for sure: if it’s an emergency, she won’t be calling the sheriff’s office.

“I’m calling the state police,” Hawthorne said. “I do not trust the Barry County Sheriff’s Office.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News: