Two days after firing Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and creating a full-blown constitutional crisis, Donald Trump signed an executive order today creating a presidential commission on "election integrity", based on his debunked claims that millions voted illegally in 2016.
"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally", he said in a tweet in November.
"This commission is a blatantly transparent ploy on the part of Trump to justify voter suppression laws with the intent of preventing people from holding him accountable for his actions". That's according to three White House officials. "And that's exactly what this commission is tasked with doing".
"He fired the person investigating a real threat to election integrity, and set up a probe of an imaginary threat", Waldman said.
Days after Trump's January 20 inauguration, he tweeted that will be "asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD". She said she did not know she was ineligible to vote.
State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, in a tweet, said, "My office found zero substantiated claims of voter fraud in NY past year". "The experts will follow the facts where they lead-we'll share updates as we have them". Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by over 3 million votes in the 2016 election.
Trump planned to sign an executive order creating the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, which would be chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, ABC News reported.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican, is the commission's vice chair and his participation will likely be controversial.
In a February interview with Bill O'Reilly, Trump said the main issue of voter fraud was registration, and vowed to look at the situation "very, very carefully".
I Asked And Comey Said Three Times, No FBI Investigation Into Trump
Burr said the firing made his committee's investigation "a little more hard but it didn't make it impossible so we'll continue". The senators said later that the Russian Federation investigations were discussed but Comey's firing was not.
He is also the creator of the Interstate Crosscheck System, a voter-purging system used in 30 states which automatically checks if people are registered in more than one state and, if so, cancels their voter registration. In Kansas, Kobach worked to pass a law that was estimated to have prevented 20,000 state residents from being able to register to vote in 2014. Today, he signed an executive order establishing a commission to study voter fraud, as well as other problems, such as improper registrations.
The Arizona law requires police to determine a person's immigration status when there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are not legally in the United States; it was partially upheld by the Supreme Court, but had other sections struck down by the court in 2011. "In our view President Trump has launched this commission to create a distraction from actual threats to our democracy, including ongoing voter discrimination, voter suppression and Russia's interference in the 2016 election".
A senior Trump administration official told CNN on Thursday the effort will be bipartisan and include current and former state election officials. And they're eager to see what the commission comes up with. During a private January 23 meeting with top congressional leaders, the president claimed that between 3 million and 5 million undocumented immigrants illegally voted in November's election.
He later reiterated the claim.
Court filings show that before the law took effect, 29 non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas and nine of them actually voted. They warned that the panel would be used to lay the groundwork for stricter voting requirements that could make it more hard for poor and minority voters to access the ballot box.
"I've never had anyone file one on a discovery order", Bonney said. Who knows. He has many reasons. USA intelligence officials have said they fully expect that Russians will attempt to hack future US elections, after their attempts to influence last year's vote. "We can't take for granted the integrity of the vote".
The investigation also found 41 noncitizens had voted, 24 people had voted twice and two people falsely voted using the name of a recently deceased family member.
Over the last decade, Kobach has emerged as one of the country's most influential immigration hawks and a crusader for stricter voter identification laws. Eight cases involved double-voting.
Count Donald Trump among the true believers of his own "illegal voters" hype.
Comments