Donald Trump's former chief of staff is continuing to push election fraud lies with another key player in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Mark Meadows is a senior partner of the Conservative Partnership Institute "election integrity network" run by Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has hosted summits around the country to mobilize conservative activists to aggressively monitor elections in states Trump lost to Joe Biden, reported The Guardian.
“The event definitely used the false allegations of fraud in 2020 as a call to action to rally support for vigilant engagement this year in the election process,” said one participant at the CPI event in Arizona. “There was a large focus on recruiting precinct officials to watch the polls and all of the other processes associated with elections.”
Meadows, who faces a contempt of Congress referral for refusing to comply with requests from the Jan. 6 select committee, was a keynote speaker in February at two-day CPI summit in Georgia, where he discussed the 2020 election in that state and measures that voting rights activists say would benefit Republican candidates.
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“Ongoing efforts to promote false claims of widespread voter fraud are dangerous and damaging to our democracy,” said Wendy Weiser, vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There is a multi-pronged attack on the core principles of our democracy in the name of election integrity. The country’s history with these kinds of so-called ‘election integrity’ operations makes clear that they create a serious risk of racial targeting, voter intimidation, and vote suppression.”
Meadows himself is under investigation for alleged voter fraud, and North Carolina officials removed him from voter rolls following a report that he registered to vote in 2020 at an address where he never actually lived.
He pulled out of a CPI summit in Arizona several days before the North Carolina inquiry was announced, and has reportedly not participated in other events.
Mitchell, who participated in a Jan. 2, 2021, call between Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger and Trump, who pressed him to "find" 11,780 votes to overturn Biden's win there.
She was subpoenaed last month by the House select committee.
