President Trump’s latest addition to his sketchy elections commission is a former Justice Department official who accused the Obama administration of “a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law” and has spent the years since resigning in 2010 from the DOJ pushing restrictive elections laws and voter purges across the country.
The White House on Monday evening announced Trump’s appointment of J. Christian Adams, currently the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Adams was hired to the DOJ’s civil rights division under President George W. Bush, and made a name for himself in his allegations that the Obama administration went too easy on two New Black Panther Party activists who were videotaped loitering outside a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 election.
Adams was named to the commission along with a Democrat, Alan Lamar King, who serves as a probate judge in Alabama.
The commission has already accrued a collection of Republicans known for the hard-lines views on voting rights, including its vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. It has come under fire for a massive voter roll data request Kobach submitted to the states last month that civil rights groups worry will be used to exaggerate the prevalence of voter fraud.
