Kris Kobach, who leads Trump’s sham voter fraud commission, has a history of trying desperately to suppress the votes of poor and minority voters, and of lying to cover it up. The ACLU documents all of this in a report on a lawsuit they filed against him, based on documents that were recently unsealed by the judge.





It started with Kobach pushing through a law in Kansas that required a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. That law was challenged in court because it violated the National Voter Registration Act. The judge ruled in a motion in that case that, in order to comply with the NVRA, Kobach had to show that there was a real problem with people illegally registering to vote in that state, which he could not do.

In October 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit blocked the requirement for people registering at DMVs. The opinion by a George W. Bush-appointed judge found that Kobach’s law had caused a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.” The court noted that before a state could impose such sweeping restrictions, there would need to be proof that significant numbers of noncitizens were actually registering to vote. But Kobach had no evidence of any real problem. He could only offer “pure speculation” that hordes of invisible immigrants were hiding out in voting booths.

So his next plan was to amend the NVRA. He wrote an amendment for that law and asked members of Congress friendly to him, including Rep. Steve King of Iowa, to submit it with some other piece of legislation. That amendment would change the language of the NVRA, which says that the state “may require only the minimum amount of information necessary” to prevent voter fraud, to say that the state “may require any information that the state deems necessary” to do so.

He pitched this amendment to the Trump transition team as well. The agenda he was carrying in that now-famous picture of him walking in to a meeting with Trump at one of his golf resorts included that amendment as one of the bullet points. A week after that meeting, during which Kobach claimed, with no evidence whatsoever, that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the presidential election, Trump sent out that ridiculous tweet claiming that he would have won the popular vote if not for the “millions of people who voted illegally.”

When the ACLU filed suit, they demanded a copy of the proposed amendment and Kobach lied and said that “no such document exists.” In his ruling, the Bush-appointed judge said, “These statements, most charitably, can be construed as word-play meant to present a materially inaccurate picture of the documents.” Let me translate that for you: He lied. Kobach was ordered to turn over the documents and he was then fined by the judge for making “patently misleading representations to the court about the documents.” The judge noted that this was a “pattern” for Kobach and that it “calls his credibility into question.” Kobach appealed the fine but it was upheld by a higher court.

It’s no wonder Trump likes Kobach so much. Like Trump, he is more than willing to lie through his teeth, even in court, when it suits his political agenda.