Maddow Blog | RNC’s ‘election integrity’ lawyer charged with election crimes
A total of 18 Republicans were indicted in Arizona yesterday as part of the party’s fake elector scandal from 2020, including 11 people who served as fake electors themselves. But it’s worth pausing to take a closer look at the other seven, each of whom worked with Donald Trump.
Take a look at this NBC News summary, and pay particular attention to the penultimate name toward the end of the paragraph:
Each of these GOP figures is notable for a variety of reasons, but it’s Bobb’s name that stood out.
The Republican lawyer’s name might not be immediately familiar to national audiences, but Bobb made headlines last month after Trump took over the Republican National Committee and hired Bobb to serve as senior counsel for election integrity.
In other words, a grand jury in Arizona has indicted the RNC’s election integrity chief on election-related crimes. Specifically, the indictment includes charges of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.
Whether anyone at the Republican National Committee will actually mind remains to be seen. A Washington Post analysis from last month made clear that Bobb’s not just another Republican lawyer.
And that was just a sampling. Bobb talked in 2022 about a plot to overturn the 2020 election results and possibly reinstate Trump to the White House. A year later, the lawyer raised the possibility of someone “intentionally” having released Covid as part of a scheme to interfere with Trump’s re-election effort.
A year after that, she suggested that it shouldn’t much matter whether a presidential candidate was found guilty of insurrection.
Complicating matters, in 2022, a leading Justice Department official went to Mar-a-Lago with a few FBI agents in the hopes of retrieving documents Trump improperly took and refused to voluntarily give back. As part of that meeting, as regular readers might recall, it was Bobb who signed a certification statement, indicating that the former president had fully complied with a grand jury subpoena and no longer had any classified materials at his glorified country club.
That statement, we now know, wasn’t true: As the FBI discovered during a search two months later, Trump still had plenty of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Bobb later told investigators that she did not draft the statement she signed and blamed the mess on another Trump attorney.
In other words, the lawyer who will help oversee the Republican National Committee’s “election integrity” efforts is a “Big Lie” proponent, an election conspiracy theorist who played a prominent role in a scandal that led to one of Donald Trump’s many felony indictments, and a suspected criminal in Arizona, where she’s been charged with election-related crimes.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
