A total of 18 Republicans were indicted in Arizona yesterday as part of the party’s fake elector scandal from 2020, including 11 people who served as fake electors themselves. But it’s worth pausing to take a closer look at the other seven, each of whom worked with Donald Trump.
Take a look at this NBC News summary, and pay particular attention to the penultimate name toward the end of the paragraph:
The [indictment] describes people who have been charged in the case but have not yet been served and whose names are redacted: [Mark] Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff; [Rudy] Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney; [Boris] Epshteyn, a Trump campaign official and attorney; former Trump campaign and White House official Mike Roman; former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis; former Trump attorney Christina Bobb; and John Eastman, another attorney and Trump legal adviser in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Each of these GOP figures is notable for a variety of reasons, but it’s Bobb’s name that stood out.
The Republican lawyer’s name might not be immediately familiar to national audiences, but Bobb made headlines last month after Trump took over the Republican National Committee and hired Bobb to serve as senior counsel for election integrity.
In other words, a grand jury in Arizona has indicted the RNC’s election integrity chief on election-related crimes. Specifically, the indictment includes charges of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.
Whether anyone at the Republican National Committee will actually mind remains to be seen. A Washington Post analysis from last month made clear that Bobb’s not just another Republican lawyer.
She has a robust pedigree, at least as far as Trump is concerned. Soon after the 2020 election, she began working with Giuliani and others to elevate baseless or later-debunked claims about the results in various states having been tainted by fraud. She was involved in the “audit” of votes in Arizona, working with Trump campaign official (and Georgia co-defendant) Mike Roman. She wrote a book, published in January 2023, cataloguing familiar (and baseless or debunked) criticisms of the results. It’s all there, from Antrim County to State Farm Arena to True the Vote. (The book’s forward was written by Stephen K. Bannon; Jim Hoft of the conspiracy-promoting site Gateway Pundit wrote a blurb.)
And that was just a sampling. Bobb talked in 2022 about a plot to overturn the 2020 election results and possibly reinstate Trump to the White House. A year later, the lawyer raised the possibility of someone “intentionally” having released Covid as part of a scheme to interfere with Trump’s re-election effort.
A year after that, she suggested that it shouldn’t much matter whether a presidential candidate was found guilty of insurrection.
Complicating matters, in 2022, a leading Justice Department official went to Mar-a-Lago with a few FBI agents in the hopes of retrieving documents Trump improperly took and refused to voluntarily give back. As part of that meeting, as regular readers might recall, it was Bobb who signed a certification statement, indicating that the former president had fully complied with a grand jury subpoena and no longer had any classified materials at his glorified country club. That statement, we now know, wasn’t true: As the FBI discovered during a search two months later, Trump still had plenty of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Bobb later told investigators that she did not draft the statement she signed and blamed the mess on another Trump attorney. In other words, the lawyer who will help oversee the Republican National Committee’s “election integrity” efforts is a “Big Lie” proponent, an election conspiracy theorist who played a prominent role in a scandal that led to one of Donald Trump’s many felony indictments, and a suspected criminal in Arizona, where she’s been charged with election-related crimes. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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