Mark Meadows, who was chief of staff to President Donald Trump, will not be charged for voter fraud related to his 2020 registration and absentee vote in North Carolina, the state’s chief law enforcement official announced Friday.
Meadows and his wife, Debra, were under investigation after media reports that the former North Carolina congressman’s voter registration listed a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., that he had never owned, stayed at or visited. But authorities were shown proof that Meadows and his wife leased the home, Debra did stay there for short periods, and there was no evidence the couple “knowingly swore to false information considering the signed lease,” said Attorney General Josh Stein (D).
Meadows is “explicitly excepted from certain residency requirements as a result of his service to the federal government,” Stein added.
“The State Bureau of Investigation conducted an extensive investigation into the fraud allegations against Mr. and Mrs. Meadows concerning their registration and voting in the 2020 elections,” Stein said in a statement. “After a thorough review, my office has concluded that there is not sufficient evidence to bring charges against either of them in this matter.”
Meadows’s spokesman, Ben Williamson, declined to comment about the prosecutorial decision.
In 2020, Meadows changed his registration after he sold his home in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, which he represented from 2013 until that year. From March 2020 to January 2021, Meadows served as Trump’s chief of staff. He had a condo in Virginia near Washington, but he did not own property in North Carolina.
Meadows cast an absentee ballot by mail in the battleground state for the November general election while his registration listed the mobile home as his residence. Trump won the state by 1.3 percentage points.
The New Yorker, which first reported on Meadows’s registered address, interviewed a previous property owner who said Meadows’s wife had rented the property for a short period and spent only one or two nights there during each visit.
According to a state Department of Justice memo about reasons for declining to charge in the case, the couple provided investigators with a signed year-long lease for the home that began on Sept. 1, 2020. Debra Meadows also shared cellphone logs for two days in October that showed her placing calls in the area.
Meadows was removed from North Carolina’s voter rolls while the fraud investigation was ongoing. North Carolina State Board of Elections spokesman Patrick Gannon said Meadows was removed “after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there.”
Although Stein said Meadows should not be charged with voter fraud, he criticized Meadows’s history of supporting Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election that stoked the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. Last week, the bipartisan panel investigating the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob released a report placing blame on “one man,” Trump, but naming others in the former president’s circle, such as Meadows, who supported him.
Earlier this year, the House recommended that Meadows be charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 select committee, but the Justice Department declined to prosecute him.
“I urge federal prosecutors to hold accountable every single person who engaged in a conspiracy to put our democracy at risk,” Stein said. “None of the matters involving January 6th, however, are relevant to the specific allegations of voter fraud concerning Mr. and Mrs. Meadows that were referred to my office for review.”
Stein added that he reserved the right to reopen the case if new information comes forward.
