As White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows aggressively pursued baseless theories that his boss, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 election because of voter fraud. But according to a new report, Mr Meadows may have committed voter fraud himself.
The New Yorker says it has dug up Mr Meadows’ voter registration form, and found something unusual. On the line where he was supposed to write his home address, the Republican reportedly put down 495 Mcconnell Rd, Scaly Mountain, North Carolina – the address of a mobile home he’s never owned.
The New Yorker spoke to the trailer’s current owner, Ken Abele, who bought it in August 2021.
“I’ve made a lot of improvements,” Mr Abele said. “But when I got it, it was not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the president would be staying.”
Mr Meadows filled out his paperwork on 19 September 2020. For his move-in date, he put the following date, 20 September. Around that time, the mobile home was owned by a woman who preferred to remain anonymous. The New Yorker talked to her too.
“That was just a summer home,” the woman, who now lives in Florida, told the magazine. “We’d come up there for three to four months when my husband was living.”
There is one link to the Meadows family, if not to Mr Meadows himself: the Florida woman said she once rented the home out to his wife, Debbie Meadows, who stayed there for one or two nights. Mr Meadows, she was certain, did not.
“He did not come,” the woman said. “He’s never spent a night in there.”
According to the US Justice Department, “providing false information concerning a person’s name, address, or period of residence” while registering to vote in a federal election is exactly the kind of crime Mr Trump and his supporters obsess about: federal election fraud.
And the form Mr Meadows filled out leaves little room for interpretation. The line where he wrote the mobile home address specifically asks for the address “where you physically live”.
Since the 2020 election, Mr Meadows has frequently repeated the falsehood that the contest was rigged, and pushed the Justice Department to investigate debunked conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud. Even since leaving office, Mr Meadows has repeated the false election narrative in his memoir, The Chief’s Chief.
The former chief of staff has not been charged with any wrongdoing. The Independent has reached out to his publisher for comment.
