DETROIT (AP) — Thousands of documents turned over by Michigan State University reveal nothing new about what the school might have known about years of sexual abuse committed by Larry Nassar, the campus doctor who assaulted female athletes, the state attorney general said Wednesday.

“It was surprising to me that we did not find anything that was incriminating,” Attorney General Dana Nessel said at a news conference.

“It seems sort of improbable to us, right?” she said. “This is a major university, obviously extensive number of employees that work there. I guess the expectation is that we would find a little bit more than we did.”

Nassar, who also worked for USA Gymnastics, which trains Olympians, is serving decades in prison for sexual assault committed under the guise of treatment as well as other crimes. Michigan State in 2018 agreed to a $500 million settlement with hundreds of people, mostly women, who said he abused them with his hands.

For years, Nessel and her predecessor clashed with Michigan State’s lawyers and its elected governing board over the release of records. While more than 100,000 documents were initially turned over to investigators, another batch of 6,000 was withheld under attorney-client privilege until this year.

Since the Nassar scandal broke in 2016, Michigan State has repeatedly said that no one at the school covered up his actions. Former gymnastics coach Kathie Klages was found guilty of lying to investigators about allegations told to her back in the 1990s, but the state appeals court threw out the conviction.

Former Michigan State President Lou Anna Simon, too, was charged with misleading investigators during a 2018 interview, but that case was dismissed before a trial.

After seeing the records, Nessel believes the university was wrong to claim attorney-client privilege over all of the documents, though a judge in 2019 had agreed with the school’s position.

The attorney general accused Michigan State of giving victims a “sense of false hope” that the records would be revealing after finally giving them up. Nessel plans to make them publicly available.

“Simply put, there remains no fulfilling answer to the question of how this abuse was able to be perpetuated on so many, for so long, without MSU, or anyone else, putting a stop to it,” Nessel said.

Michigan State spokesperson Emily Gerkin Guerrant said the university has taken significant steps to improve campus safety and culture since 2016.

Ripples from the Nassar saga have spread widely. In April, the U.S. Justice Department announced a $138 million settlement with more than 100 people who accused the FBI of mishandling allegations against the doctor in 2015 and 2016, a critical time gap that allowed Nassar to continue to prey on victims before his arrest.

USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee made a $380 million settlement for its alleged negligence.

A Justice Department internal watchdog recently said the FBI has failed to report some child sexual abuse allegations to local police or social service agencies even after its poor handling of claims about Nassar led to changes.

Story by Ed White, Associated Press

As polls and political pundits work to predict the still evolving presidential race, an expert in Michigan says if the vote is close, one group “could potentially decide the state.”

Erick Gonzalez Jeunke is a political analyst specializing in Latinx politics at Michigan State University. In an interview with the Michigan Public Radio Network, he said the state’s 400,000 eligible Latinos voters could hold the key to winning in Michigan, if the campaigns reach out to them.

Listen: Political analyst says Michigan Latino voters ‘could potentially decide the state’

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michelle Jokisch Polo, WKAR News: In 2020 Joe Biden won the presidential election in Michigan by fewer than 200,000 votes. With more than 300,000 eligible Latino voters in Michigan, this group could prove vital in the state. How are parties engaging this voting bloc?

Erick Gonzalez Jeunke: I haven’t seen a lot of engagement for specifically this voting block. What that means is what they should have been doing and what I haven’t seen a lot of, but a lot of this happens behind the scenes, obviously, are registration drives. One of the gaps for Latino voters nationally, and then of course here in Michigan, is not just turning out to vote, but being registered to vote. A large part of that gap — about 70% of eligible voters — are even registered to vote. And so that’s part of the big gap. I mean, this is one of the lingering things, if you account for that, once you just look at registered voters, Latinos turn out at about the same rates as other groups, but the gap is really in getting individuals registered to vote. So that requires a lot of work, that requires the parties caring about these voters. Now when we get into this part of the season, a lot of the parties both nationally and here in Michigan, either leave that up to other groups, or they say, ‘look, we have limited resources. We can’t go out and mobilize people who aren’t registered.’ So a lot of that work takes place in the years and months that lead up to these elections.

MJP: This time around, it seems that there may have been fewer young democrats showing up to vote like they did in 2020, in the state primary election. Why do you think this is and tell us about the young Latino vote in November?

EGJ: I think it’s probably due to a not very competitive set of federal races, and then earlier in the year, a not very competitive presidential primary. But it’s also just an enthusiasm gap. We’re right in the middle of seeing this change with the change at the top of the ticket from Biden to Harris. I was just looking at some national polling data today, and what’s happening here in the Midwest and in Michigan is that Harris has seemed to have activated — particularly younger voters’ — enthusiasm about this race. So paying attention, getting excited, and that excitement turns into actual voting. It can turn into knocking on doors. It can turn into working for the campaign. So it’s still a little bit early to see what the overall effect of this is, but the early signs indicate that a change at the top of the ticket may reverse some of this lack of enthusiasm that we saw in the primaries, and particularly for younger Latinos.

MJP: How important do you think the Latino voting bloc is for the state’s general election?

EGJ: It depends how close the race is. It could potentially decide the state, and yet that depends on if the parties do the work to mobilize and get Latinos who aren’t registered, registered to get folks to turn out. So unfortunately, we won’t know until after the election. And it comes down to how close is Michigan actually going to be? It’s looking a lot less close than it did a month ago. But things could change, and we could go back to a really close race, if I had to put money on it right now, that it’s probably not going to be as close as we thought it was a month ago. But if it’s close, the Latino vote could be really, really important, and the Democratic and  Republican parties could say, ‘boy, we really should have done more work to mobilize Latino voters in Michigan, because we could have taken it.’ And I think both parties would say the same thing about Pennsylvania andWisconsin.

Use the media player above to hear the full interview with Erick Gonzalez Jeunke, political analyst specializing in Latinx politics at Michigan State University.

Political conventions are highly polished productions, but that wasn’t always so. The Democratic National Convention in 1968 was the last one with any real drama.

Matt Grossmann, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, says the 2024 DNC mirrors the ’68 event in some ways.

“Superficially, there are some similarities,” he says. “It’s in Chicago, it’s going to have a lot of protests, and it involves a nominee who didn’t run in the primaries being elevated to the presidential position.”

Grossmann is referring to then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He won the Democratic nomination after President Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for a second full term. Humphrey faced division within the party, fueled by protests against the Vietnam War. He eventually lost to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.

Similar, but different

But Grossmann says Democrats are more united now than they were in ’68. President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the ticket in 2024. Grossmann says Biden’s support helped unify the party.

“The people who did not want Biden to step aside, I think, have quickly come around to Kamala Harris as the nominee,” he said.

Shortly after Biden’s endorsement, several potential challengers fell in line behind Harris, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Grossmann says party rules require that a candidate have the support of at least 300 delegates to be considered for nomination. He says Biden’s late departure from the race created a narrow window for someone other than Harris to run.

“There wasn’t really much of an opportunity for anyone else to contest the nomination without the rules changing substantially,” he said.

Conventions still matter

Harris and her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, had already won their nominations before their parties’ conventions began.

But Grossmann says conventions are still important. They give politicians seeking higher office a chance to boost their prospects on a national stage. He cites the 2004 DNC, where delegates heard from a young Illinois state lawmaker who won the presidential election four years later.

“The 2004 convention is when Barack Obama came to prominence,” Grossmann said. “So, they can make for rising stars.”

Maintaining momentum is hard

Grossmann says conventions do give candidates a short-term boost, but he expects the race to tighten before the November election.

“The average bump in the polls out of a convention has been three or four percentage points, but that bump has receded in the weeks following,” he said.

Polls had Harris leading Trump by an average margin of 3% going into the convention.

Read more: 

• Support for Harris surging in key swing states ahead of DNC, polls show
• DNC hosts first ever panel on Palestinian human rights
• Michigan delegates at RNC want to lower the temperature of political discourse