Trump’s call for election-fraud probe fraught with peril
Former Justice Department lawyers and prominent Democrats are warning the president against a blatantly political exercise.
.. Such an effort would also conjure up memories of an anti-voter-fraud drive launched under President George W. Bush a decade ago. That initiative — and the firing of some U.S. attorneys who were reluctant to go along with it — led to a major political imbroglio that prompted the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
.. Perhaps due to those sensitivities, White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested Wednesday that Trump is more likely to pursue a commission that would examine the sources and scope of potential fraud rather than trying to find cases to prosecute. Spicer described the planned inquiry not as an investigation, but a more genteel-sounding “study.”
.. “Part of the reason we need to do a study is … there’s a lot of people that are dead that are on rolls, that are voting in two places or that are on the rolls in two different states, sometimes in three different states,” Spicer said
.. Even a high-profile commission would be something of a high-wire act, since Democrats will insist that controversial voter ID laws also be part of any such review if they take part.
.. “The thing I want him to do, I want him to investigate, are all of the people who don’t get the chance to vote, who have been denied the right to vote,” Cummings said.
.. “The Obama administration had the tools to fight voter fraud but let them gather dust. Because of that neglect of their duties, aliens got on the rolls, people voted multiple times and lawlessness took hold of our elections.”