Less than a week after the Republican National Committee unveiled a fresh “historic” program to monitor polls for fraud, the committee’s top lawyer was among those charged in an alleged plan to operate false claims of fraud to overturn the results of the Arizona presidential election.
Indeed, a lawyer, RNC senior adviser on election integrity Christina Bobb, was scheduled to appear at an April 25 online meeting to recruit activists for the GOP’s vote surveillance efforts, although she did not show up. The meeting was organized by extreme conspiracy theorists who, like Bobb, helped spread lies about illegal voting.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced the accusations April 24 against 18 people, seven of whom were removed. Many News organizations they used details of the indictment to identify Bobb and the other six. May on Friday confirmed Bobb’s indictment.
The confluence of events involving Bobb, the RNC and a loose network of anti-fraud activists underscores how the Trump-controlled GOP appears to be setting the stage for a challenge to this year’s election by making the same false claims about illegal voting – and even some of the same key numbers – what in 2020
When asked for comment on Bobb’s reported indictment and whether she remains employed by the RNC, an RNC spokesman declined to respond on the record.
Bobb did not respond to an inquiry about her no-show at the April 25 event.
‘Historic’ GOP vote tracking program
The Arizona indictments came less than a week after the Trump campaign and the RNC announced a “historic, 100,000-strong” effort to closely monitor the voting process, calling it “the most sweeping and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.”
“Every time a ballot is cast or counted, Republican poll watchers will observe the process and report any irregularities,” the RNC said in a statement press release.
The commission called the initiative “a historic collaboration between the RNC, the Trump campaign and passionate grassroots coalitions that are deeply committed to combating voter fraud.” This appeared to be a reference to the party’s efforts to target anti-fraud activists like those at Thursday’s meeting, many of whom believed lies about the 2020 election.
Multiple lawsuits found no evidence of systematic or widespread fraud in 2020.
The RNC’s vote monitoring efforts are supported by Lara Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, who took over as co-chair of the RNC at the end of February. Shortly thereafter, Bobb was announced as the RNC’s election integrity lawyer.
Trump is the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president in 2024.
Lara Trump warned in an April 23 letter interview that the vote monitoring program would cover “individuals who may physically touch ballots” at polling places on Election Day. Policies regarding biased poll watchers vary by state.
17 charged with fraud conspiracy
Bobb’s absence from Thursday’s online meeting after organizers promoted her appearance in advance may have been because she had more pressing matters on her mind.
The accusations filed in Arizona allege a conspiracy to operate fraudulent voters to invalidate the state’s 2020 presidential vote.
The 11 people named in the indictment are Arizona’s fraudulent electors, all Trump allies. The remaining seven people, whose names were redacted, were identified by news outlets including: CNN and New York Timesas Bobb, as well as Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Mike Roman and Boris Epshteyn.
The indictment states that one of the seven defendants “was a lawyer for the Trump campaign” and “made false claims of widespread voter fraud in Arizona and six other states.” According to the indictment, the person also “encouraged the Arizona Legislature to alter the election results” and “encouraged (Vice President Mike) Pence to accept the votes of fraudulent Arizona Republican Party voters on January 6, 2021.”
Bobb joined the Trump campaign as a lawyer after the 2020 vote and was among campaign officials under Giuliani who orchestrated a scheme to operate false claims of fraud as justification for reporting fraudulent voters in seven states where Trump lost, including in Arizona, CNN has reported.
Bobba too he tweeted on January 6, 2021: “@vice president @Mike_Pence we can solve this problem now by sending it back to lawmakers.”
The indictment names Trump – unnamed but described as “the former president of the United States who spread false claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election” – as an unindicted co-conspirator.
The indictment alleges that the scheme used false electors to vote for Trump in order to receive Arizona’s electoral votes by “falsely representing themselves as duly elected and qualified electors for President and Vice President of the United States from the State of Arizona.”
“Defendants defrauded the citizens of Arizona by falsely claiming that these votes were contingent solely on a legal challenge that would change the outcome of the election,” the indictment continues. “In fact, defenders intended that their false Trump-Pence votes would encourage Pence to reject Biden-Harris votes on January 6, 2021, regardless of the outcome of the legal challenge.”
Conspiracy theorists in RNC courts and election deniers
The meeting at which Bobb was scheduled to appear on Thursday was organized by two Florida activists with ties to leading election deniers, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and was attended by hundreds of grassroots anti-fraud activists from across the country .
A similar April 4 follows event, during which RNC Election Integrity Program Director Christina Norton told activists how to get involved with the party’s vote monitoring program. States Newsroom participated in both virtual meetings.
The April 25 meeting featured a parade of speakers, including former Democratic Party consultant Naomi Wolf, who made claims of illegal voting in 2020 and 2022, predicting that this year’s vote would be similarly rigged, and calling on supporters to take action .
“The current situation is that President Trump will once again win the presidential election, just as he did in 2020.” said one of the speakers, Greg Stenstrom, a Pennsylvania conspiracy theorist and co-author book “Parallel elections: a fraud plan” which alleged massive voting fraud in the state in 2020.
“But it will be taken away from him and all of us if we do not restore fair and honest elections in the short time we have until November. He cannot remain president unless we take action.”
Instead of Bobba’s live performance, Steve Stern, the organizer of the conversation, played an interview he recently conducted with her for his podcast.
In the interview, Stern asked Bobb what could be done about President Joe Biden’s plan to add “a million illegal aliens” to the voter rolls. (Is no evidence that Biden has such a plan, despite regular similar claims from the far right).
Bobb agreed that there is a “concerted effort to allow illegal individuals to cast ballots” and added: “This is a very, very serious issue this time and we are looking into it…Does law enforcement need to address this? deal with it because it could potentially be criminal?”
“When it comes to voting illegally,” Bobb continued, “once you register, it is very difficult to undo the process. Because the registration is considered valid.”
Research has consistently shown that the number of votes cast by foreigners is negligible. Brennan Center 2017 analysis found that suspicious – unconfirmed – non-citizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of all votes cast in the 2016 election.
Other connections
In addition to these two meetings, there have been other recent incidents of RNC staffers courting right-wing activists who spread election disinformation.
Vertical he spoke last month with far-right podcaster Breanna Morello. She also joined a recent conference call with several Trump-allied groups that promote lies about 2020, The Guardian reported.
Both the April 25 and April 4 meetings were organized by Stern and Raj Doraisamy, two far-right activists from Florida and Lindell allies who have helped spread false claims of illegal voting.
Last month, Stern spoke with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, to promote the April 4 meeting. “We have so many illegal aliens in this country,” Stern said. “They want to vote. We have to stop them.
Doraisamy was supposedly outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and then founded the group Defend Florida, which went door-to-door to collect thousands of “affidavits” from Floridians in an attempt to show that the state’s 2020 election was corrupted by mass fraud.
In 2022 event organized by the group, Doraisamy thanked Lindell for helping with the door-to-door campaign.
Also speaking on the April 25 conference call was Joe Hoft, whose website Gateway Pundit, founded with Hoft’s brother Jim, is key vector for spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, the Covid vaccine and more.
This is how Joe Hoft’s self-published book “The Steal” is described on Google Books side: “It’s the early morning hours of November 4, President Trump had a significant lead in swing states, but he warned of a 4 a.m. vote drop. He was right again. When Americans woke up later that morning, the election was rigged.”
Another speaker at the meeting, Jay Valentine, used Lindell’s initial funding to create voter data monitoring software.
According to documents obtained by the progressive group American Oversight, Valentine worked closely with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to convince lawmakers in Wisconsin and other states to operate his “fractal programming technology” to detect mass fraud.
“Voter fraud is a nationwide crime committed locally, primarily by Democrats,” Valentine he wrote separately, promoting the idea of a national voter fraud database. “We cannot fight industrial-scale, sovereign-scale, large-scale voter fraud with reports, press releases and webinars.”
