Lawyers’ Committee Files Lawsuit Against Trump Election Integrity Panel

FILE - In this May 17, 2017, file photo, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach talks with a reporter in his office in Topeka, Kan. Kobach, who is helping lead President Donald Trump's commission on election fraud ann... FILE - In this May 17, 2017, file photo, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach talks with a reporter in his office in Topeka, Kan. Kobach, who is helping lead President Donald Trump's commission on election fraud announced Thursday, June 8, 2017, that he's running for the Republican nomination for governor. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner, File) MORE LESS
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Another group is suing President Donald Trump’s bogus “election integrity” commission for failing to follow federal open meeting laws.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a lawsuit Monday after the election commission failed to provide information about its upcoming meeting on June 19, which is not open to the public. The Lawyers’ Committee says this violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires advisory committees to post notice of meetings, make their discussions open to the public and that written records of the meetings be shared publicly. 

Similar to a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers’ Committee complaint claims the election panel’s upcoming meeting should be open to the public and calls on the group to be transparent about its intentions with the voter data it requested from all 50 states.

The lawsuit asks for a temporary halt on the election commission’s operations until it can produce public records from its meetings. It also demands that all of the panel’s meetings be open to the public.

“We filed today’s lawsuit because the so-called Election Integrity Commission has been operating covertly and its actions, to date, have been shrouded in secrecy,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee, said in a statement. “Through the Federal Advisory Committee Act, we are using an important statutory tool to expose and curb the illegitimacy of this commission and to bar the commencement of any meetings before they make materials available for our inspection. In our view, the commission must not conduct any meetings before complying with our request. We will continue to fight to expose all of the commission’s illegitimate actions.” 

The suit was filed with Arnold and Porter Kaye Scholer, an international law firm in Washington, D.C. The lawsuit is not the Lawyers’ Committees first action against Trump’s election commission. The group sent letters to secretaries of state telling them to not comply with the panel’s voter data requests and put together a bipartisan resolution condemning the group. It filed a Hatch Act complaint against the commission chair Kris Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas.

Nearly every state has responded saying it will either not provide any of the information or only give the election integrity commission publicly available data.

Read Lawyers’ Committee complaint below:

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