Key Point: “Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.”

The Guardian: RNC plan for 2020 denialist to head ‘election integrity’ unit raises alarms

By: Peter Stone

• As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has cemented its hold on the Republican National Committee (RNC), alarms are being raised about the organisation’s tapping of the fervent election denialist Christina Bobb to run an “election integrity” unit.

• Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.

• Bobb helped spread phoney voting fraud claims with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former campaign operative Mike Roman, both of whom along with Trump and others face charges in Fulton county, Georgia, of conspiring to overturn Biden’s win there; Bobb was not charged.

• “By designating Bobb to the RNC post, they’re beginning to promulgate the same false narrative of widespread election fraud that we saw in 2020 and 2021 but way earlier,” said John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania and now president of Dickinson College.

• “There’s a concept known as illusory truth,” he added. “If you keep saying these same falsehoods over and over, people begin to believe they’re true, and it has the potential to morph into violence. That puts judges, prosecutors and others at risk.”

• The RNC’s hiring of Bobb comes as Trump keeps falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and talks up new efforts this year to “guard the vote” to ferret out potential fraud. Experts have conclusively said fraud was not a factor in Trump’s loss by over 7 million votes, and stressed that historically voting fraud has been minimal.

• The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said the RNC’s hiring of Bobb “is a further indication of how the RNC has not only become an arm of the Trump campaign, but an outlet for the most extreme elements of the election denial movement”. Likewise, the ex-Republican congressman Dave Trott predicted: “Bobb will be leading the charge and saying the election was rigged if Trump loses.”

• But Bobb’s litany of baseless fraud claims as she worked with key Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election results, shadow her new RNC role. For instance, Bobb used her perch at One America News Network (OAN) to spread bogus claims of fraud that led to a defamation lawsuit against her and OAN by the voting technology firm Dominion; Bobb and OAN have both denied any wrongdoing.

• Separately Bobb signed a letter falsely certifying to the justice department on Trump’s behalf in 2022 that after a “diligent search” he had returned all the classified documents the special counsel Jack Smith later charged the former president with illegally taking to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.

• Still, some lawyers and election veterans are troubled by the RNC’s hiring of Bobb given her history of election denialism and Trump’s obsession with debunked claims of fraud in 2020. “I don’t think it’s a good thing when a major party hires fringe characters who don’t understand how elections work,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

• Looking ahead, Chioma Chukwu, the deputy executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, called Bobb’s hiring by the RNC “a dangerous sign of how entrenched the election denial movement has become on the right”.

• “Elevating Bobb – who continues to push baseless lies about voter fraud – to a top post focused on ‘election integrity’ serves no purpose other than to sow chaos and confusion in November, allowing partisan actors to cry ‘foul’ if their preferred candidate loses.”