Former President Donald Trump’s election as the next leader of the national Republican Party was briefly linked in the last election cycle to a voter fraud monitoring group closely linked to Cleta Mitchell, the conservative lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election To undermine 2020.
Trump is endorsing North Carolina GOP Chairman Michael Whatley to be the next chairman of the Republican National Committee, according to the New York Times reported February 6: According to the Times, Ronna McDaniel, who currently holds the post, told Trump she will resign later this month.
Whatley, a veteran GOP campaign operative who served in the administration of President George W. Bush reported Having won Trump’s support because he supports Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud. Last year, Trump approved Whatley, currently the RNC’s general counsel, will become co-chair of the organization.
Whatley spoke at a 2022 conference aimed at rooting out voter fraud organized by the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, the group’s founder Jim Womack told States Newsroom.
“We took them to our summit,” Womack said. “I gave Whatley the opportunity to address our people and he talked about how it was going to be a great team effort.”
Around that time, Whatley Womack also briefly had NCEIT included in a county chair conference call, said Womack, who chairs the Lee County GOP chair.
NCEIT is a Chapter of the Election Integrity Network, which Mitchell founded in 2021 to train poll watchers to aggressively look for fraud in elections. Womack has called Mitchell “our mentor.”
Mitchell, who lives in North Carolina, was closely involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including participating in the December 2020 phone call in which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed. . win the state.
A special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, recommended that Mitchell be indicted, but she was not charged.
The North Carolina Republican Party declined to comment on Whatley’s work with NCEIT.
Womack, who unsuccessfully ran against Whatley for state party chairmanship in 2019, said the relationship faltered after Whatley’s appearance at the summit because Whatley had kept NCEIT at arm’s length from the state party.
Womack said the party under Whatley discouraged Republican volunteers from getting involved with NCEIT.
“They told a lot of counties, don’t use their reporting system, don’t go to their training, go to our training,” Womack said.
In fact, Womack complained that Whatley had not gone far enough in the fight against fraud.
Still, under Whatley, the state party in 2021 revealed a 16-member “Election Integrity Committee” to advocate for stricter voting rules and recruit election observers.
At a conference this year hosted by the conservative group CPAC, Whatley said recommended that without the Election Integrity Party’s legal work, Democrats would have stolen the 2020 state Supreme Court election, which the Republican candidate won by 401 votes.
“You can’t tell me that in 100 counties in North Carolina they wouldn’t have gotten to four votes (in each) if I hadn’t had attorneys and attorneys in every single one of those counties,” Whatley said.
“This needs to be part of the Republican establishment going forward,” Whatley added, citing increased legal efforts. “It’s going to be one lawsuit after another.”
