Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president's baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election. Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite "substantial evidence of voter fraud" due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Dunlap said of ... more than 8,000 pages of [commission documents that were turned over to him], "It wasn't just a matter of investigating President Trump's claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims." Dunlap said that ... the voting fraud panel was marked by obfuscation, secrecy and confusion related to the work the panel was engaged in. So Dunlap filed a lawsuit against the commission ... alleging that he and the other Democratic members were being excluded from its work and materials. He received the documents he sought only ... after a federal judge ordered the administration to turn them over, despite the objections of the Justice Department.
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