Michele Fiore


Michele Ann Fiore is an American politician and committeewoman for the Nevada Republican Party and justice of the peace for Pahrump in Nye County. She was formerly a member of the Nevada Assembly and the Las Vegas City Council.
In 2024, Fiore was convicted of seven counts of federal felony fraud for stealing $70,000 meant for a memorial to fallen police officers and spending it on personal expenses including cosmetic surgery. In 2025, she was pardoned by President Donald Trump before she was due to be sentenced.

Biography

Fiore moved to Nye County in November 2022 after narrowly losing the race for Nevada State Treasurer in the 2022 election. She was a member of the Nevada Assembly from 2012 to 2016. Fiore, who represented much of northwestern Clark County, served two Assembly terms.
On December 7, 2015, she confirmed that she would not seek reelection, and would instead enter the 2016 race for Nevada's 3rd congressional district in southern Clark County. On June 15, 2016, Fiore placed third in the primary, with 18% of the vote.
She was elected to the Las Vegas City Council in 2017 and represented Ward 6. Fiore has been a high-profile supporter of Cliven Bundy and Donald Trump.
She briefly ran in the Republican primary for the 2022 Nevada gubernatorial election before dropping out and winning the Republican nomination in the 2022 Nevada State Treasurer election, which she lost to Democratic nominee Zach Conine, 46.0% to 47.7%. She is currently the Nevada Republican Party national committeewoman responsible for fund-raising in the state.
In late 2022, the Nye County Board of Commissioners appointed Fiore justice of the peace. In June 2023, she was elected to the office.

Issues

Campus gun carry bill

Fiore is a staunch supporter of gun rights. She sponsored Assembly Bill 148 to allow concealed firearms on the campuses of colleges and grade schools and in day care facilities. In an interview with The New York Times, Fiore said, "If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them. The sexual assaults that are occurring would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head." In December 2015, Fiore sent her constituents a 2016 calendar that included a family Christmas portrait under the month of December featuring her immediate family all holding guns, and her grandchildren, one of whom was holding what appeared to be a handgun. The photo went viral on Facebook and drew criticism for depicting a small child holding a weapon.

Same-sex marriage and medical marijuana

Fiore is noted for having been the only Republican to vote to lift the ban on same-sex marriage and to legalize medical marijuana.

Description of treatments possible under right-to-try bill

Fiore was a primary sponsor of the 2015 Nevada right-to-try law, legislation that allows doctors to perform medical procedures that are being used in ongoing FDA-approved clinical trials but have not achieved FDA approval for terminally ill patients who are not responding to traditional medical treatment. On a February 2014 edition of her radio show, discussing Right-to-Try, Fiore described the cancer treatment by Cancer is a Fungus author Tullio Simoncini as an example of treatments that the terminally ill could access under Right-to-Try: "If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a PICC line into your body and we're flushing, let's say, salt water, sodium carbonate, through that line, and flushing out the fungus.... These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective."
On her February 21, 2015, broadcast, the theme was the concept of Right-to-Try; the bill had been introduced in the Assembly the previous week. At the top of the show Fiore raised the topic of her 2014 comments, "an issue that I have gotten a lot of questions about". She said, "I made comments about cancer that I didn't put in the proper context." She had had a friend with cancer who had made "radical improvement using a doctor out of Italy's treatment covered in his book and his book was called Cancer Is A Fungus... it was a tumor therapy of some sort. The point I was trying to illustrate was that people like my friend... should have the right to decide their own fate and try experimental treatments like this." She did not repeat that cancer is a fungus or that salt water could flush it out. After Fiore addressed the issue she and guest Jackie See, M.D., defended the Simoncini treatment and other alternative techniques as viable and a means by which the U.S. could lead the world medically if regulation and bureaucracy were reduced and doctors could "explor all the treatments not knowing where the next breakthrough will come from." After the 2015 broadcast, she received renewed national attention for her 2014 statements.
Using sodium bicarbonate as a cancer treatment is espoused by Tullio Simoncini and is known as the Simoncini cancer treatment. This method has not been proven, and no evidence suggests that it or treatment with salt water works, but if either were to be accepted under the bill's requirements it could be legally considered a non-FDA-approved treatment that a terminally ill patient in Nevada could request. The bill that Fiore introduced eight days before her 2015 show requires that the drug, product or device "have successfully completed Phase 1 of a clinical trial" and that it be "tested in a clinical trial that has been approved by the ."

January 6 United States Capitol attack reaction

Days after the January 6 United States Capitol attack, Fiore attended the Republican National Committee's winter meeting on Amelia Island, Florida, where she told the New York Times, "I surely embrace President Trump."

Incidents and concerns

Charity fraud case

On July 12, 2024, a federal grand jury indicted Fiore on charges of defrauding donors to a charity to memorialize police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. She is accused of soliciting tens of thousands of dollars for a statue honoring a fallen officer and instead using the money for personal expenses, including plastic surgery, rent, and her daughter's wedding. Fiore gave a statement to the media after the hearing in Las Vegas's federal courthouse. She was released on her own recognizance to await a trial scheduled to begin on September 24. She was also ordered to not have contact with any non-family-member witnesses outside the presence of legal counsel.
In October 2024, Fiore was convicted on six counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The jury returned the verdict almost immediately after it went into deliberation.
A sentencing hearing was scheduled for May 14, 2025, but President Donald Trump pardoned Fiore on April 24.

Gun use against law enforcement

In March 2016, Fiore was interviewed by the Las Vegas Sun. When asked about her support of militants involved in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier that year, she said,
In April 2016, Fiore was interviewed for the KLAS 8 television show "Politics NOW". Discussing whether the 2014 armed resistance against federal agents was justified, she said,
In May 2016, the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers sent a letter denouncing Fiore's statements, concluding,
In response, Fiore told KTNV 13 Action News that her original statement referred to federal Bureau of Land Management agents, not local police. She described BLM law enforcement agents as "wannabe cops" and the BLM as "a bureaucratic agency of terrorism that terrorized Americans, especially ranchers." When pressed about the meaning of her previous statement, she said,

Involvement in the Bundy standoff

In April 2014, Fiore was interviewed by MSNBC's Chris Hayes and by Fox News's Sean Hannity about the armed confrontation at Bunkerville, Nevada, between law enforcement officers and Cliven Bundy and his supporters. The interviews were shared thousands of times on social media. Fiore said, "The federal government should not show up with guns to collect on a debt" and called for the termination of "whoever ordered this to be done."

Statement about wanting to shoot Syrian refugees herself

On November 21, 2015, on her weekly AM radio program on KDWN, Fiore explained why she had not signed a Nevada Assembly Republican caucus letter that called for a review of federal safeguards before Nevada would resettle Syrian refugees. She said, "We didn't know anything about the letter, nor did we get invited to be on the letter." She went on, "He's like, 'The Syrian refugees.' I'm like, 'What, are you kidding me? I'm about to fly to Paris and shoot 'em in the head myself.' I mean, I am not OK with Syrian refugees. I'm not OK with terrorists. I'm OK with putting them down, blacking them out. Just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life. I'm good with that."
On December 7, 2015, she told the Associated Press, "I was not talking about the refugees." She added, "I do not want Syrian refugees in our state, period", and said that she did not trust the refugee vetting process to screen out terrorists.

IRS investigation

In December 2014, it was reported that the Internal Revenue Service had filed dozens of tax liens totaling about $1 million against Fiore and her home healthcare businesses, Always There 4 You and Always There Personal Care. The liens against the businesses involved unpaid employee payroll taxes. In response, Fiore stated, "I am one hundred percent in compliance with IRS, period." Fiore blamed her ex-husband, who at one time acted as her accountant, and a former employee who stole from her while at the same time sent fraudulent documents to her current accountant to hide the embezzlement.
The fallout from her issues with the IRS led to her being removed as majority leader and chair of the Assembly Taxation Committee. It was reported that she reacted to the removal by saying there was a war on women in the Assembly Republican Caucus. "It was a total misquote," Fiore said. "Nevada Republicans are not waging a war on women. We have a group in our caucus that are waging a war on conservatives."