At roughly this time a decade ago, Mark Meadows was probably feeling pretty good about his career in North Carolina politics. The Republican had just easily won his first congressional campaign in the state, and the future appeared bright. Local voters proceeded to re-elect him by wide margins in the next three election cycles.
Following up on our earlier coverage, the former congressman’s position in the Tar Heel State has taken a significant turn for the worse. The Associated Press reported:
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said it has submitted to state prosecutors the findings of its voter fraud probe into Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, who was simultaneously registered to vote in North Carolina and two other states earlier this year. The State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday that it has turned over the case file detailing its investigation into Meadows’ North Carolina voter registration and listed residence to Attorney General Josh Stein’s office.
In a statement, the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation said prosecutors with the state attorney general’s office will determine whether to file criminal charges in the case.
In case anyone needs a refresher — the bureau’s investigation took roughly eight months — let’s review how we arrived at this point.
Before and after Election Day 2020, Meadows talked quite a bit about voting irregularities. Like so many members of Donald Trump’s team, the Republican was heavily invested in the demonstrably false idea that there was widespread fraud.
“Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around?” Meadows asked in August 2020. He later complained in his memoir about some people casting ballots despite not being “an actual resident of the state they were voting in.”
It was against this backdrop that the public learned that Meadows himself appears to have cast a ballot from his former home state of North Carolina, despite having moved away and no longer being an actual state resident.
A local district attorney referred the matter to the state attorney general’s office, which asked North Carolina’s Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration. We now know that investigators have submitted their findings to state prosecutors.
Based solely on publicly available information, it appears Meadows will be facing questions that might be difficult to answer. As regular readers know, Meadows and his wife owned a home in North Carolina, but he sold his house in March 2020 and lived in a condo near Washington, D.C.
That wouldn’t be especially notable — it’s common for political insiders to move to the D.C. area — except Meadows continued to vote from North Carolina.
In fact, in September 2020, Meadows submitted a voter registration form that used the address of a rented mobile home. The official materials directed Meadows to include the residential address where he “physically” lived and sign the document “under penalty of perjury.”
There’s reason to believe, however, that Meadows did not actually live in the rented mobile home. According to the former White House chief of staff’s former landlord, Meadows never even spent the night there. It’s an open question as to whether he even ever set foot in the dwelling. The new owner of the property told The New Yorker magazine, which published the original scoop, that it’s “really weird“ that Meadows listed the mobile home as his residence. Nevertheless, the Republican used that address to cast an absentee ballot, through the mail, for the 2020 general election. When WRAL in Raleigh first reported on the story, the local NBC affiliate added, “The revelation has raised questions about potential voter fraud and could prompt state and local officials to investigate.” You don’t say. As best as I can tell, Meadows has not responded publicly to any questions regarding these allegations. Watch this space.
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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