US DOJ Convenes Federal Grand Jury To Look Into NC-9 Ballot Fraud

If this is Robert Higdon's investigation, there's no explicit word about that in early news reports. The grand jury has been empaneled by the US Department of Justice in DC, but they're subpoenaing all the major players including McCrae Dowless, the Mark Harris campaign, and the NC State Board of Investigations.

UPDATE

Robert J. Higdon Jr.

Subpoenas are coming from the Public Integrity Section of the US Department of Justice. The federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Robert Higdon, remains silent and inactive on the matter of Republican ballot stealing. The Washington Post includes these paragraphs:

State election officials first referred evidence of ballot fraud in the 9th District to the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina in January 2017, nearly two years before allegations roiled Harris’s race against Democrat Dan McCready last fall. Frustrated state investigators said that they saw little evidence that prosecutors were pursuing the case.

A spokesman for the office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why the subpoenas were sought by the Justice Department in Washington and not the U.S. attorney in Raleigh, Robert J. Higdon Jr.

Complicating matters is the fact that one of Harris’s sons, John, is an assistant U.S. attorney in Higdon’s office.

John Harris did the right thing in testifying honestly about his warnings to his father about McCrae Dowless. John Harris's boss Robert Higdon doesn't appear interested in justice or the rule of law in this case.

McGruff, The Crime-Fighting Dog, Is Lying on the Porch

Robert ("Bobby") Higdon

Leslie McCrae Dowless was indicted and arrested yesterday in the ballot fraud case in the NC-9. Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman is bringing the charges.

Meanwhile, where is the US Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, who ought to take an interest in blatant fraud employed to corrupt a federal election?

Robert Higdon Jr., the federal prosecutor for eastern North Carolina, does not appear to be investigating the 9th District case. Higdon has instead prosecuted cases of noncitizen voting, producing minimal penalties. President Trump and other Republicans have portrayed noncitizen voting as a widespread phenomenon, although there is little evidence to support their claim.

Why would Trump's man in the prosecutor's office want to look into actual election crimes that benefitted a Republican when there are so many suspicious-looking brown people he can single out?

NOTE: Rev. Mark Harris's son John, whose testimony last week completely sunk the Harris campaign's boat, actually works as an assistant attorney in Higdon's office. And Rev. Harris himself is not out of D.A. Freeman's line of fire:

More charges are likely, Freeman said. She said her office’s “very large-scope” investigation will examine “who was aware of and helped finance these fraudulent absentee ballot activities” — a sign of potential legal peril for Harris, who hired Dowless. She also plans to determine whether anyone else besides Dowless allegedly tried to obstruct either the criminal or state board investigations.

Trump's US Attorney in Eastern District of NC Implicated

US Attorney Robert Higdon,
enabler?

After the 2016 general elections, the NC State Board of Elections (SBOE) forwarded almost 300 pages of evidence of absentee ballot fraud in Bladen County to US Attorney for the Eastern District Robert Higdon. In 2016, two years ago.

Higdon did nothing about that evidence. Instead, he chose to prosecute 19 non-citizens who mistakenly voted because they thought they could. Honest mistakes will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law while elaborate schemes for illegally harvesting absentee ballots that benefit Republican candidates ... well, yawn.

Joe Killian at NC Policy Watch reports that Bob Hall, former executive director of Democracy NC, accuses US Attorney Higdon of following "the Republican Party line on election fraud. That means pursuing cases that advance the GOP narrative of supposedly rampant voter fraud by non-citizens and convicted felons, Hall said, while essentially ignoring much more complicated and statistically prevalent fraud – like absentee ballot tampering.

“If the election rigging operation in Bladen County looked like it involved a group of non-citizens voting, Higdon would have deployed the FBI in a heartbeat,” Hall said. “Imagine what his office would have done if he had reports of white conservative voters being victimized by a multi-year ballot stealing operation led by Black operatives. Instead, the reports his office received from the State Board of Elections pointed to the reverse scenario, which wasn’t Higdon’s priority and why the FBI only recently got involved.”

Earlier this year Higdon’s office issued subpoenas on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the North Carolina elections board and more than 40 county boards in the eastern third of the state. The move led voting rights advocates to ask why federal investigators and prosecutors seemed to be concentrating so heavily on non-citizens when so much evidence of absentee ballot fraud had been served up for years by the state board of elections.

The pending likelihood of a mandated new election in the North Carolina 9th Congressional District has blown Mr. Higdon's cover, and we trust that the January 11th SBOE hearing into ballot fraud will expose everything to the sanitizing light.

The Connection Between Ballot Subpoenas in North Carolina and DJT's Ego

Well, knock us over with a feather duster! A lengthy investigative piece posted last week on Salon proves that there was past substantial voting by "illegal aliens" in a North Carolina election, only it was done to benefit a Republican candidate for Fayetteville City Council.

We've written about Wesley Meredith before, because he's now an incumbent member of the NC Senate, and a powerful one, and he has a credible Democratic opponent this year in Kirk deViere.

But back more than a decade ago, according to Steven Rosenfeld, Meredith was trying awfully hard to get onto the Fayetteville City Council. He ran once and lost. Then he ran again in 2005 and won, but not without a lot of questions and evidence of illegal registrations by non-citizens who were supposedly taking a keen interest in seeing a landscape contractor elected to city council.

Marshall Tutor, who retired in March 2018 after many years as lead investigator for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, was deeply involved investigating Meredith's 2005 win. "There are a lot of problems with that case," Tutor told Rosenfeld. "I spent a lot of time on fraudulent absentee ballot requests and non-citizens requesting absentee ballots. And it was federal crimes involved because there were absentee ballot requests made for Fayetteville citizens who knew nothing about it, that were mailed over state lines into a drop box in Virginia.”

Tutor took his evidence to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina -- "evidence showing that non-citizens tried to, and did, register and vote, and vote early. We had enough [evidence] that, had it been thoroughly investigated, there would have had to have been charges on somebody” -- but “the U.S. attorney’s office told us they would get back to us after they had time to go over the documentation. About 13 months later they sent an email saying they didn’t have enough evidence to go forward with any kind of investigation. Keep in mind Meredith was a huge fundraiser for state Republican candidates during this time.”

Robert J. Higdon Jr.,
U.S. Attorney
Eastern District of N.C.

Hmmm. Who was that Federal prosecutor who said no thanks to busting illegal voting? Why, Robert J. Higdon Jr., who is now, presently, the very U.S. Attorney who engineered the recent surprise subpoena for some 20 million ballots and voting records from 44 eastern counties of North Carolina ... 44 eastern counties where the proportion of Latinos just happens to be highest. That appears to be the point of the subpoenas and more evidence that the Trump administration is still pursuing its fraudulent claim that millions of "illegals" voted in 2016.

See, when Trump's bogus commission appointed to look into illegal voting crashed and burned -- it was led by Kris Kobach of Kansas (what's the matter with Kansas?), a sloppy partisan with no qualms who's now trying to move his conspiracy theories into the Kansas governor's mansion -- when that commission disbanded in disgrace, Kobach transferred the "hunt for illegals" to the Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE, which made the requests to Robert J. Higdon Jr. to issue those blanket subpoenas at 5 p.m. on the Friday before Labor Day.

Threatening subpoenas delivered not only to the county boards of elections in 44 eastern North Carolina counties, but also to every DMV office, where many people register to vote, with the clear threat and implication that someone has broken the law and needs to be keel-hauled ... coming from a U.S. Attorney with a history of partisan decision-making ... well, ain't that just a kick in the pants?

We're thankful we have a State Board of Elections and an Attorney General willing and able to push back against the intimidation, the lingering penumbra of Kris Kobach, vampire hunter.