Mark Meadows Won't Face Voter Fraud Charges

UPDATE Dec 31, 2022 7:31 AM CST

Mark Meadows won't face any legal trouble for the absentee ballot he cast in the 2020 election. Meadows, then serving as former President Trump's chief of staff, cast that absentee ballot by mail to vote in the battleground state of North Carolina, reports the AP. Meadows listed as his address a property he and his wife had rented, and reports suggested neither had spent much time there. However, "our conclusion was ... they had arguments that would help them if a case was brought such that we didn’t believe we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they had engaged in intentional voter fraud," said state Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat.

Mar 18, 2022 12:00 AM CDT

Former Trump aide Mark Meadows is under criminal investigation. Following a New Yorker story earlier this month raising the question of why Meadows registered to vote in North Carolina in 2020 when he was not living there, the State Bureau of Investigation confirmed it has opened a probe into the allegations, the News & Observer reports. Meadows, who moved to North Carolina from Florida in the 1980s and represented the state in Congress until he resigned to become then-President Trump's chief of staff, sold his residence there in 2020 and has not lived there since, according to the New Yorker.

Yet on his voter registration paperwork, he claimed his residence was a mobile home in the state that, the New Yorker reports, he does not own and may never have even visited. The previous owner of the residence says Meadows' wife rented it out briefly sometime in the past few years, but that Mark Meadows did not spend any time there during that rental period. The couple expressed no interest in buying the property when she put it up for sale, and someone else purchased it, she says. Local news station WRAL says it confirmed many of the details in the New Yorker story.

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A spokeswoman for the North Carolina Attorney General's office says the office got a request from Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch that the state Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Sections assume her role in the issue due to a conflict of interest; Meadows had appeared in campaign ads for her and contributed to her campaign. The DOJ agreed, and the AG's office requested the SBI investigate alongside the State Board of Elections. (More Mark Meadows stories.)