GRAND RAPIDS — Mark Totten’s time as the U.S. attorney general covering half of Michigan, including Lansing and Grand Rapids, will end in less than a week.
President Joe Biden appointed Totten in November 2021. At the time, he was chief legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, having previously lost a 2014 race or Michigan attorney general to Bill Schuette, who served two terms as the state’s top law enforcement officer.
Current Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat like Totten, is term limited and cannot seek re-election in 2026. Totten didn’t rule out a second run for AG, but said he’ll make that decision after his time as a federal prosecutor officially ends at 11:59 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 20.
“I am then looking forward to having a little bit of downtime with my family,” he said. “Previously, I was with the governor for several years, so it’s been an intense few terms of public service. I’m looking forward to having some downtime and then, as part of that process, I gotta figure out what to do next. And I’m not sure.”
On Tuesday, Totten, who taught in Michigan State University’s law school before his 2014 run for AG, told the State Journal that last week he formally submitted his letter of resignation, which is standard protocol following a presidential election.
In an interview, he looked back on his four years as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan and highlighted initiatives he hopes will remain.
Gun violence prosecutions were major focus
In May 2023, Totten announced a “Safe Summer” initiative, a collaboration between local, state and federal law enforcement that was renewed the following year. The initiative moved some gun prosecutions from county to federal prosecutors, who have more resources to track guns and longer prison sentences following conviction.
The goal of that and other gun violence efforts, Totten said on Tuesday, was to be “laser focused” on the few people in a city that are pulling triggers and the people who traffic firearms around a city, state or the U.S.
“We don’t want to just pull guns off the street, because that doesn’t, at the end of the day, change what’s happening in terms of shootings,” he said. “We want to actually focus on those people that are shooting other people, and the people that have the best knowledge about that are local (law enforcement agencies).”
The focus on the handful of people in Lansing or elsewhere who are most likely to commit gun violence isn’t unusual and has been adopted by the Lansing Police Department and other agencies that worked to address a spike in violence that began during the pandemic. It’s also an approach used by community violence intervention groups like Advance Peace in Lansing.
Totten’s office also pursued several prosecutions over ghost guns — mail order or 3D printed firearms that require some assembly — and devices known as “switches” that can quickly turn a firearm into a fully automatic weapon.
There’s some evidence that these efforts at the federal, state and local levels have have had an impact.
Fourteen people in Clinton, Eaton and Ingham counties died from violence in 2024, about 10 fewer than in 2023, when a gunman killed three students and critically injured five others on the Michigan State University campus and four other people died in a pair of murder/suicides in Eaton County, State Journal records indicate.
Politics among prosecutors and working with locals
The gun violence prosecutions and initiatives meant Totten and his staff had regular contact and shared investigations with law enforcement in the Greater Lansing area, and he mentioned by name the two Lansing police chiefs he worked with: Chief Ellery Sosebee, who retired in June 2024, and Chief Robert Backus, who took the position a month later.
“Having those close working relationships is super important,” Totten said. “What you don’t want is a bunch of siloed law enforcement agencies that, you know, feel territorial or that aren’t talking or sharing information. That’s one of the worst things that can happen.”
And while his replacement will be appointed by Republican President Donald Trump, much of the work that U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country do is less political, although there are some areas like the federal death penalty that will be more influenced by who sits in the White House.
“We’re all trying to do the same thing,” Totten said of local, state and federal law enforcement. “We’re all trying to protect the public. And we all need to work together.”
Significant local cases handled by federal prosecutors
Totten pointed to prosecutions in a variety of case types — crimes against children, the environment, hate crimes, public corruption — as accomplishments from his time in Grand Rapids, including two local cases.
In July 2023, Rashad Trice kidnapped 2-year-old Wynter Cole-Smith from her Lansing home and later killed her by strangling her with a phone cord. The kidnapping during the July 4, 2023, holiday weekend sparked searches around the state. Wynter’s body was found in an alley in Detroit.
Local and federal prosecutors charged Trice, 28, whose state cases were consolidated into one prosecution by Nessel’s office. Trice pleaded guilty in state and federal courts and is serving two life sentences. Totten used the case as an example of his office’s work on crimes against children, which included sexual exploitation prosecutions as well.
In June 2023, Seann Patrick Pietila, of Pickford told someone over Instagram that he “had a desire and a plan to kill or injure Jewish people and use a camera to stream his attack over the internet,” federal prosecutors said in court records following Pietila’s arrest.
Pietila was living in the Lansing area at the time he made the threats, but was residing in the Upper Peninsula when the FBI raided his home later that month. The search turned up ammunition, a shotgun, a rifle, a handgun, knives, a Nazi flag, gas masks and military manuals, officials said.
Pietila pleaded guilty in November 2023 and was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison the following March.
Reporter Ken Palmer contributed to this story. Contact reporter Matt Mencarini at mjmencarini@lsj.com.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: US attorney for Lansing to step down, says gun prosecutors were key