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As revealed by newly disclosed documents obtained from the US Department of Justice, a member of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank tried to have Democrats, mainstream Republicans, and academics excluded entirely from the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
In a February 22nd email signed by a Heritage Foundation employee, whose name the Justice Department has chosen to redact, the employee expressed their indignation over the direction the commission’s chairman, Vice President Mike Pence, was headed.
“We are told that the members of this commission are to be named on Tuesday,” the letter says. “We’re also hearing that they are going to make this bipartisan and include Democrats. There isn’t a single Democratic official that will do anything other than obstruct any investigation of voter fraud and issue constant public announcements criticizing the commission and what it is doing, making claims that it is engaged in voter suppression.”
The letter continues: “That decision alone shows how little the WHouse understands about this issue.”
The Heritage employee—potentially Hans von Spakovsky, who was later appointed to the commission—goes on to criticize the Trump administration for failing to consult with Heritage about the appointments. The author asserts that “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics” are unfit to participate in the commission; appointing them would “be an abject failure because there aren’t any that know anything about this.”
Update: Heritage confirmed to Gizmodo that Hans von Spakovsky wrote the letter. The organization’s full statement is below.
No “real experts on the conservative side of this issue” have been called on to guide the commission, the author wrote, “other than Kris Kobach,” the Kansas Secretary of State who now co-chairs the commission alongside the vice president.
The email was sent to Sessions’ aide Peggi Hanrahan, who then forwarded the letter to the attorney general. It was acquired this month under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. In a statement, Campaign Legal Center President Trevor Potter, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, criticized the commission’s co-chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, for having since directed the presidential commission to “undermine citizens’ right to vote.” Specifically, Potter pointed to a bogus allegations recently made by Kobach of voter fraud in New Hampshire—a state Hillary Clinton won by a 0.3 percent margin.
In an September 7th article for Breitbart News, Kobach claimed that 5,313 New Hampshire voters were not residents of the state. The only “evidence” he could muster, however, was that the 5,313 had registered to vote with out-of-state driver’s licenses but had not registered a car in New Hampshire. Kobach forgot—or just intentionally ignored in furtherance of his own agenda—that thousands of New Hampshire college students from other states reside and attend classes in New Hampshire districts that saw high voter turnouts in 2016.
Assembled by Trump by executive order in early May, the commission was tasked with completing a report about “vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting.” Its creation followed erroneous claims repeated by the president alleging widespread voter fraud which the president has claimed cost him the popular vote. Seemingly emasculated by having obtained fewer votes nationwide than Clinton, Trump asserted weeks after his inauguration that between 3 and 5 million illegal ballots were cast for his opponent.
“The president does believe that,” fired White House press secretary Sean Spicer said four days after Trump’s inauguration. “He continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have presented to him.” But nearly seven months later, the White House has still failed to produce a single document to support the president’s conspiracy theory. And that should come as no surprise, given that it was born entirely of fake news.
The source of Trump’s claim is, by his own admission, a Houston-based organization called True The Vote. The organization is led by Greg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission official. Phillips has been solely cited by Breitbart News over the years as an “election integrity researcher.” Days after Trump’s victory, Phillips publicly asserted, via Twitter, that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the election; though he repeatedly refused or ignored requests for evidence made by reporters.
On November 14th, Phillips’ claim was simultaneously picked up by Alex Jones’ website InfoWars and the personal blog of then-Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Less than two weeks later, Trump joined the chorus, claiming on Twitter that he would have “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” (Phillips’ November 13th tweet, which read: “We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens,” has since been deleted.)
Phillips has also publicly claimed that the only election hacking committed in 2016 was carried out by President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security.
Kobach and Pence eventually appointed five Democrats and seven Republicans to the commission, though Democrat Luis E. Borunda, Maryland’s deputy secretary of state, has since resigned. But it remains completely under the direction of the Republicans.
“Any truly bipartisan commission on these things has to have bipartisan leadership,” Danielle Lang, an attorney for the Campaign Legal Center, told Gizmodo. “There has to be some kind of bipartisan power on the commission—or it’s just a fig leaf. If you look at all of the former commissions that this would be similar to, they all had Democrat and Republican vice chairs. Instead, in this case, you have Kris Kobach and Mike Pence. That alone truly disqualifies it from being truly bipartisan in any meaningful way.”
In a statement to the commission on September 6th, one of its Democratic members, Probate Judge Alan King, offered this suggestion: “This Commission, and we as a people, should be expanding the rights of our citizens to vote, instead of arguably looking for ways to keep people from voting.”
Neither the Heritage Foundation nor the Attorney General’s office responded to a request for comment. We’ll update if they do.
Update, 5:54pm: Heritage Foundation spokesperson Sarah Mills sent Gizmodo the following statement, in which she confirms Hans von Spakovsky is the author of the letter:
“The Heritage Foundation is scrupulously nonpartisan. Hans von Spakovsky is a former member of the Federal Election Commission and has managed our Election Law Reform Initiative for many years. He brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to the discussion of voter fraud, and holds strong views on the topic. The views expressed in the email are his own.”