North Carolina authorities launched an investigation into former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Thursday, following a report earlier this month that revealed a questionable address Meadows registered under to vote in the 2020 election.
Nazneen Ahmed, spokeswoman for North Carolina attorney general Josh Stein’s office, confirmed to The News & Observer newspaper that the State Bureau of Investigation is looking into allegations of voter fraud against Meadows.
“We have requested that the SBI investigate alongside the State Board of Elections,” Ahmed told the Observer. “At the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review the findings.”
The probe comes after the New Yorker reported earlier this month that Meadows registered to vote in the 2020 election with an address of a mobile home in the North Carolina township of Scaly Mountain that he supposedly never lived in.
The person who used to own the property told the New Yorker that she had rented it out to Meadows’ wife for two months within the past two years, but she only spent a night or two there at that time. The former Trump official “never spent a night in there,” the former property owner told the New Yorker.
The Observer reported that Meadows remains registered to vote at that same address as of Thursday. Meadows, who formerly served as a North Carolina congressman, voted absentee by mail in the 2020 election.
Meadows is among former President Trump’s staunch allies who continue to push bogus claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 election.
Last December, the House voted to refer Meadows for criminal prosecution for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 Select committee. Meadows also sued the committee, its members, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) — listing them as defendants in an effort to block the enforcement of the committee’s subpoena.
Before he ultimately stonewalled the committee, Meadows’ had a short-lived cooperation with the panel, in which he voluntarily handed over a tranche of damning text messages. Through obtaining Meadows’ texts, the committee shed light on Meadows’ involvement in Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results, which included text messages showing an alleged plot to appoint “alternate slates of electors” on the day networks called Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Additionally, the committee revealed frantic texts from Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade on the day of and in the days following the deadly Capitol insurrection. The hosts pleaded with Meadows, urging him to find a way to convince Trump to call off the mob of his supporters as they were storming the Capitol and endangering lawmakers’ lives.
