Those lawsuits, which are unlikely to be resolved before Election Day, potentially set the stage for Trump and his Republican allies to claim the election was stolen through fraud should he lose. The strategy appears to foreshadow a replay of the last presidential election, once again potentially plunging the country into chaos of the kind that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol when Congress met to certify the election.
Bobb, who, like Trump, continues to insist that the 2020 election was stolen, recently described her thinking about what constitutes fraud while recounting her experience helping with the effort to overturn that election. Bobb took a leave of absence from her job as an anchor on the far-right network One America News to assist former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, in the effort to overturn the election.
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Bobb told podcaster Matt Kim during an interview recorded last month at the RNC headquarters in Washington, D.C. that she visited 12 states in 2020 and found “evidence of fraud everywhere.” The most compelling evidence, she said, “was the manner in which the election was conducted,” specifically referring to emergency orders issued by governors during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that voters could safely participate in the election through mail-in balloting. Those measures were subject to extensive litigation, in some cases between the states’ legislative and executive branches, in the run-up to the 2020 election.
“That all should have been deemed illegal, and mailing out ballots in contradiction to different state laws,” Bobb told Kim. “That was an illegal way of conducting an election.”
Bobb’s leadership role in the RNC’s election integrity unit suggests to some observers that should Trump lose a second time, legal efforts to overturn the election will fail, but bogus claims of election fraud could again create strife and uncertainty.
Sam Oliker-Friedland, a former voting rights litigator at the U.S. Department of Justice who now heads the nonprofit Institute for Responsive Government, told Raw Story that the election deniers loyal to Trump hold a striking record of failure.
“Election deniers executed a deeply flawed strategy in 2020,” he said. “They failed to win the presidential election. They failed to win their court cases. Election deniers who ran in 2022 failed to win their elections. What hiring Christina Bobb means is they’re trying to execute the same strategy they did in 2020, without any tweaks. Honestly, it’s somewhat baffling.”
‘Defenders of election integrity for Donald Trump’
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist who is currently serving a federal prison sentence for defying a subpoena from the House Select January 6th Committee, suggested in an interview with Bobb shortly after her indictment that loyalty to Trump was the primary qualification for the job, calling her one of “the fiercest defenders of election integrity for Donald Trump.”
Two others named by Bannon as Trump “defenders” were Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn, another attorney, who were both charged alongside Bobb with conspiracy, fraud and forgery related to the fake electors scheme in Arizona. Epshteyn currently serves as a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, according to his X bio, while Giuliani is currently appealing a $148 million defamation judgment awarded to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss.
Among the galaxy of Trump allies involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Bobb stands out for her commitment to the cause far beyond the former president’s departure from the White House in January 2021.
Bobb was present with Giuliani and John Eastman — architect of the legal strategy to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into setting aside the electoral vote, and also a co-defendant in the Arizona case — at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. The Willard has been described as the “command center” for the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
After the election, Bobb and Chanel Rion, the White House correspondent at One America News, set up a nonprofit that funneled funding and volunteers to the so-called “Arizona Audit,” an effort by pro-Trump partisans to reexamine the 2020 election.
By 2022, Bobb was working as a lawyer for Trump. She signed a declaration stating that all classified documents had been returned from the former president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago to the government, which turned out to be untrue. Bobb reportedly told the FBI that she signed the declaration at the request of another Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, even though she did not have firsthand knowledge of the matter.
Trump was indicted on 40 felony counts of mishandling classified documents in July 2023. Bobb was not charged in the case, and in July 2024, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Trump.
Bobb told Kim she received a phone call from Chris LaCivita, co-manager of the Trump campaign, asking her to come to work at the RNC. She started the job in March. The following month, she was charged in Arizona with conspiracy, fraud and forgery for her role in the fake electors scheme.
The RNC did not respond to requests for comment from Raw Story, but Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung previously waved off the charges against Bobb as “another example of Democrats’ weaponization of the legal system.”
For her part, Bobb told Kim during the podcast interview last month: “It’s going to be fine. I’m not worried about it. You know, I don’t think the Arizona attorney general really has a case against me or any of the other defendants; I don’t think any crime occurred. But we’ll see how it goes.”
She added that she believes the indictment separated the stalwarts from the weak-hearted in the Trump movement.
“It really is the great exposure on the conservative side of, like, who’s willing to say the hard things, and I think we can see who those people are,” Bobb said.
Bobb's name doesn't appear on a recent RNC memo providing an update on the election integrity effort and RNC co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump have provided the public face for the effort, but Bobb's remarks during the podcast interview with Kim last month indicate she's still closely involved.
‘This is a bulls--- claim’
Bobb told Kim that she believes “the litigation team is doing as well as we can.” She cited a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in August addressing whether Arizona voters should be required to produce proof of citizenship.
The court turned down the RNC’s request to block Arizona’s 42,201 “federal only” voters from participating in the upcoming election. “Federal only” voters in Arizona may only cast ballots in presidential and congressional elections. Unlike Arizonans who complete a state voter registration form, federal only” voters are not required to submit proof of citizenship, but they are required to swear under penalty of law that they are U.S. citizens, as explained by NPR. The number of “federal only” voters currently eligible to vote in the upcoming election is almost four times the margin of victory for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“It’s very difficult to clean up this issue, especially two months before the election,” Bobb told Kim. “The laws, particularly around voting and citizens being the only legal voters, yeah, that all needs to get cleaned up.”
During the interview with Kim, Bobb claimed without evidence that Democrats “are trying to get as many illegal aliens registered to vote as possible,” highlighting the evolution of Trump’s false claims of election fraud from attacking mail-in balloting procedures put in place to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to the campaign’s current strategy of demonizing immigrants.
Trump has been pushing the baseless claim that Democrats are trying to import immigrants to illegally vote in the election at least since January, and regularly recycles it on the campaign trail, including falsely accusing his opponent Kamala Harris during the debate in Philadelphia of “trying to get [illegal immigrants] to vote.”
The lie has filtered down from the top of the ticket, and has been widely embraced by Republican officials such as Alabama state House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen and conservative voters.
Under the elaborate conspiracy theory posited by Bobb during her podcast interview last month, she claimed that “NGOs” that support immigrants are participating in an illegal ballot harvesting scheme.
“The concern is not that the illegal aliens are actually going to cast a ballot; they just need to get the registrations,” Bobb told Kim. “Because they want the mail ballots. A lot of the illegal aliens, as they’re registering to vote — the intel that we’re receiving is that they’re registering — you have to have a residence, right?... You have to have a house to register at. And a lot of them are registering with the NGOs that brought them across the border in all 50 states. Those ballots don’t even necessarily go to the illegal alien.
“They had to go harvest all the ballots, collect them and cast them,” she continued. “A good chunk of them this time are just getting mailed straight to [the NGOs].”
Paul Gronke, a political science professor and director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College, told Raw Story that if Bobb is going to make such a bold claim, she should present the evidence to back it up. Anomalies such as batches of new registrations using the same address, which happen to correspond to a nonprofit that supports immigrants, can easily be detected, he said, and partisan researchers routinely comb through voter data looking for such evidence.
“You’ve got an NGO and an address,” Gronke said. “This is just hand-waving. This claim is easily demonstrated. If Christina Bobb had this information, they would have showed it. I’m calling bulls---. This is a bulls--- claim.”
Bobb could not be reached for comment for this story.
Bobb’s unsubstantiated allegation about a Democratic ballot harvesting scheme using immigrant NGOs echoes her role in promoting the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems electronically deleted millions of Trump votes in the 2020 election. The election software company is suing Bobb and her colleagues at One America News, claiming they spread misinformation.
The federal judge presiding over the case granted a request from Bobb to delay her deposition and production of documents in the Dominion lawsuit until December, after the election. Bobb’s lawyers argued that she might need to invoke her Fifth Amendment rights during her Dominion deposition to avoid self-incrimination in the Arizona case.
‘Holding my breath’ for Nov. 5
The RNC’s election integrity program, while more ambitious this time around, replicates efforts made four years ago. During the 2020 election, affidavits from Republican poll observers in critical swing states such as Michigan, Georgia and Arizona, fueled conspiracy theories and propped up lawsuits challenging the results of the lawsuit, which were uniformly rejected by the courts.
Officials at the RNC’s election integrity unit claim to have signed up 219,712 volunteer poll observers, as of Sept. 30 across 18 states. They include the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; along with Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia, which the Trump campaign considers to be within reach. Other states targeted by the GOP election integrity program include Florida, Montana, Ohio and Texas, which have key Senate races; California and New York, which have key congressional races; and Maine and Nebraska, where electoral votes are allocated by congressional district.
Bobb told Kim she is heartened to see so many Republican volunteers sign up to monitoring polling places. She added: “But I want to see those people show up. I want to make sure every dot is connected.”
Bobb said the Republican volunteers will serve as the party's eyes and ears at polling places and counting centers.
“It’s overused, but if you see something, say something," she said. "Or if you hear something weird, report it. Because that’s the only way things are going to get corrected. That happened in 2020, but people were reporting them on Election Day. It just didn’t have enough time to catch.”
Bobb told Kim she expects more or less the same after the Nov. 5, 2024 election as what unfolded four years ago.
“The litigation, I think the RNC — and other groups as well — have probably litigated as much as reasonably can be done,” she said. “So, that’s great. But, if you remember from 2020, things didn’t get bad until November 3rd, 2020, when, you know, everything, it hit the fan, and you can see how people reacted. So, I’m kind of holding my breath for that.”
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