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North Carolina Attorney General to determine whether to file criminal charges against Mark Meadows

Investigators were reviewing North Carolina voter registration for the former Trump administration White House chief of staff.

RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation has submitted its conclusion and findings in their investigation about whether Mark Meadows, the former United States congressman from the state and former chief of staff to President Trump, commited voter fraud. The information is now in the hands of the North Carolina Attorney General's Office, which will review the case file to determine where Meadows could face any criminal charges.

In March, Attorney General Josh Stein's office asked the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) to look into Meadows' voter registration.

“We have asked the SBI to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings,”  N.C. Department of Justice spokeswoman Nazneen Ahmed said in an email at the time.

North Carolina state investigators were probing the voter registration of Meadows, amid questions about him listing a home he never owned on voter record.

From March: North Carolina investigating Meadows' voter registration

At the time, public records showed Meadows was registered to vote in multiple states, including North Carolina, where he listed a Macon County 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 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.

By April of this year, after the allegations were first reported by the New Yorker, Meadows was removed from North Carolina voter registration by the county's Board of Elections.

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.

Members of the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 have also be reviewing Meadows' actions on the day of the insurrection. Under scrutiny are text messages received from the then-chief of staff for the Trump administration.

Documentation obtained by the committee shows Meadows was receiving text messages from lawmakers and Fox News personalities including Sean Hannity.

New text messages surfaced Monday, revealing U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) text Meadows wanting Trump to declare martial law to stop Joe Biden from becoming president in January 2021.

In a statement to WCNC Charlotte, Norman said the text message "came from a source of frustration" with the 2020 election.  

On Tuesday, he SBI released a brief statement following the conclusion of Meadows' voter registration:

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation’s (SBI) case file concerning Mark Meadows and allegations of voter fraud has been submitted to the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office for review. Final case file documentation was submitted in early November. Prosecutors with the AG’s Office will determine whether criminal charges are appropriate, not the SBI. Because the case is now pending a decision by the AG’s Office, no additional information is available.

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.

Trump asserted his defeat was due to widespread fraud. There has been no evidence that widespread voter fraud occurred that would have altered the outcome of the 2020 election.

The Associated Press and Tegna contributed to this report

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