North Carolina investigating Meadows' voter registration

North Carolina state investigators are probing the voter registration of Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff to President Donald Trump, amid questions about him listing a home he never owned on voter records, the state attorney general’s office said Thursday.

Attorney General Josh Stein's office asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows' voter registration after a local prosecutor requested that state authorities oversee any probe of the matter, N.C. Department of Justice spokeswoman Nazneen Ahmed said in an email.

“We have asked the SBI to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings,” Ahmed said.

In a letter Monday, Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch asked the attorney general's office to handle any probe into Meadows' voter registration and said that she would recuse herself from the matter. She noted that Meadows, a former congressman from the area, contributed to her campaign for DA and appeared in political ads endorsing her.

She also said she had no knowledge of the case until it was reported in the media.

“Until being contacted by the media, I was unaware of any allegations of voter fraud surrounding Mark Meadows,” she said

Welch's office released the letter Thursday and declined further comment.

A spokesman for Meadows didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment Thursday.

WRAL-TV first reported that state authorities are investigating Meadows' voter registration.

Public records show that Meadows is registered to vote in two states, including North Carolina, where he listed a mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting a ballot in the 2020 presidential election.

Meadows listed a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, as his physical address on Sept. 19, 2020, while he was serving as Trump’s chief of staff in Washington, D.C. Scaly Mountain is just north of the Georgia-North Carolina border and about 90 miles (145 km) west of Asheville.

Meadows later cast an absentee ballot for the general election by mail. Trump won the battleground state by just over 1 percentage point.

The New Yorker, which first reported the questions about Meadows' voter registration, interviewed the current and former owner of the Scaly Mountain property. The previous owner said Meadows’ wife rented the property “for two months at some point within the past few years” but only spent one or two nights there. Neighbors said Meadows was never present, The New Yorker reported.

Public records indicate Meadows registered to vote in Alexandria, Virginia, almost exactly one year after he registered in Scaly Mountain and just weeks before Virginia’s high-profile governor’s election last fall.

Meadows frequently raised the prospect of voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election, as polls showed Trump trailing Joe Biden, and in the months following Trump’s loss to suggest Biden was not the legitimate winner. He repeated those baseless claims that the election was stolen in his 2021 memoir.

Businesses Assail Texas Move to Classify Care for Trans Teens as 'Child Abuse'

More than 60 major businesses, including household names in technology and retail, have signed onto a new advertising campaign in Texas protesting a move by the state’s governor to label as “child abuse” medical treatments that are widely considered to be the standard of care for transgender teenagers.

In digital ads and a full-page advertisement in Friday’s Dallas Morning News, the businesses assailed a Feb. 22 directive by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, requiring teachers and medical professionals to report to child protective services parents who are helping their children get such treatments as puberty-suppressing drugs and hormones.

Abbott’s order — announced a week before the Texas primary, in which he won nomination for another term as governor — came as lawmakers in Florida have also moved to advance a bill banning instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in some elementary school grades, widely called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Both measures are part of a wave of anti-LGBTQ crackdowns by conservative politicians heading into the midterm elections.

“It’s a page from the playbook that we’ve seen before, and it’s very familiar to me,” said Jay Brown, a senior vice president for programs, research and training at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, which arranged for the Texas ads.

“Discrimination is bad for business,” Friday’s print ad says, followed by a demand that Abbott drop the new policy.

The signatories include old blue-chip brands like Johnson & Johnson and Macy’s as well as tech giants like Apple, Meta and Google, the apparel makers Levi Strauss & Co. and Gap Inc., and retailers like Ikea and REI.

“Our companies do business, create jobs, and serve customers in Texas,” the ad says, adding that the companies “have stood to ensure LGBTQ+ people — our employees, customers, and their families — are safe and welcomed in the communities where we do business.”

“The recent attempt to criminalize a parent for helping their transgender child access medically necessary, age-appropriate healthcare in the state of Texas goes against the values of our companies,” the ad continues. It warns that the policy could instill fear among parents of transgender children worried that providing them the best possible medical care could “risk having those children removed by child protective services.”

“It’s not just wrong, it has an impact on our employees, our customers, their families and our work,” the ad concludes.

The effort by businesses to pressure the state recalls the response after North Carolina officials passed a bill in 2016 requiring people to use public bathrooms appropriate to the sex listed on their birth certificates.

Whether there will be a more aggressive response from businesses to the Texas measure or others like it remains to be seen.

“I think the community has been really hungry for more,” Brown said, adding, “We really do see that this is the beginning and not the end of more voices speaking out against these laws.”

Brown said that Texas lawmakers had caused intense fear among families of transgender youths, who he said were some of the most vulnerable people with the fewest legal protections.

“People are really scared,” he said. “I know families who have had to move hundreds of miles from their homes because their lawyers are telling them it’s not safe in the country they live in, in Texas. The lawmakers who do this, they’re making a short-term wager with their extremist base that they’re going to score a couple points at the risk of people’s lives.”