North Carolina state investigators are looking into former Trump aide Mark Meadows for alleged voter fraud after the former White House chief of staff registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home that was never occupied.
The public information director for the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, Anjanette Grube, confirmed on Thursday that Meadows' case was under investigation. Previous reports said that the North Carolina State Board of Elections was also looking into the former Trump aide.
Voter Fraud Investigation
The press secretary for the North Carolina Department of Justice, Nazneen Ahmed, released a statement saying that local district attorney Ashley Welch referred the matter to the Department of Justice's Special Prosecutions Section. Ahmed noted that the agency has agreed to the request and asked the SBI to investigate, the findings of which they will later review.
The 62-year-old lawmaker is known for representing North Carolina's 11th Congressional District from 2013 to 2020. Meadows was also the chief of staff of former United States President Donald Trump from March 2020 until the Republican businessman left office in January 2021, as per the Washington Post.
In a letter on Monday that was sent to the attorney general's office, Macon County, North Carolina, District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch asked to get designations of agencies to investigate Meadows. They said that the allegations against the former Trump aide involved potential crimes committed by a government official.
The probe is a result of reports from Mar. 6 that raised questions about the legitimacy of Meadows' voter registration in North Carolina in September 2020. The home address that the former Trump aide used was a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, which measured 14 by 62 feet.
According to CNBC, however, it is believed that the former Republican congressperson does not and has never owned the property. There were also debates on whether or not he lived there for even a single night. Debbie, Meadows' wife, had rented the residence once in the last several years.
Voter Registration
Under state law, a voter is required to live at their registered address for 30 days before the election in which they vote. Lying on voter registrations is considered a crime and is punishable as a felony.
The former president, who lost his bid for re-election in November 2020 to President Joe Biden, has repeatedly claimed that he lost due to voter fraud. During the time when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger in January 2021, Meadows was on the phone line.
The former chief of staff repeatedly echoed Trump's claims of voter fraud in the 2020 elections, suggesting that Biden was not the legitimate winner of the race. Furthermore, he expressed baseless claims in his new memoir. For a long time after, judges to election officials to Trump's own attorney general, William Barr, said that there was no voter fraud, Politico reported.
On Thursday, Meadows was not in the office at the Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington where he is currently a senior partner. Staff at the CPI said that she would forward the requests for comments to Meadows' spokesperson.
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