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Mark Meadows faces North Carolina investigation over his voter registration

North Carolina officials are investigating the voter registration of former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Patrick Semansky
/
AP
North Carolina officials are investigating the voter registration of former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, faces investigations in North Carolina over an allegation that he never resided at the address he put on his voter registration ahead of the 2020 election.

A spokeswoman for the Democratic state attorney general told the Raleigh News & Observer that the office got a request from the district attorney in Macon County, in western North Carolina, to take over the investigation after a recusal.

"We have requested that the [State Bureau of Investigation] investigate alongside the State Board of Elections," the spokeswoman, Nazneen Ahmed, told the newspaper. "At the conclusion of the investigation, we'll review the findings."

Meadows has been a prominent voice and echo of Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

The probes stem from revelations first reported in early March by The New Yorker. The report said that Meadows registered to vote ahead of the 2020 election using the address of a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C.

The individual who owned the home in 2020 told The New Yorker and a local TV news station, WRAL, that she rented it to Meadows' family, but Meadows himself "never spent a night down there" and his wife spent just a few days there.

According to North Carolina election law, intentionally providing false information on voter registration is a felony.

Meadows did not respond to The New Yorker's request for comment following publication and has not responded to subsequent news outlets' requests.

The former North Carolina congressman represented the state's 11th District for seven years. He resigned in the spring of 2020 to become Trump's chief of staff and was part of the administration during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

At the end of last year, congressional lawmakers investigating the attack on the Capitol voted to hold him in contempt for ceasing cooperation with the committee.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Elena Moore is a production assistant for the NPR Politics Podcast. She also fills in as a reporter for the NewsDesk. Moore previously worked as a production assistant for Morning Edition. During the 2020 presidential campaign, she worked for the Washington Desk as an editorial assistant, doing both research and reporting. Before coming to NPR, Moore worked at NBC News. She is a graduate of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and is originally and proudly from Brooklyn, N.Y.