Prominent Democrats denounced the voter fraud commission as an attempt to give respectability to Donald Trump’s assertion that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo Trump disbands voter fraud commission Kobach says Homeland Security immigration officials will take over probe

President Donald Trump is dumping a controversial commission that was charged with investigating his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud during the 2016 election, the White House said Wednesday.

Trump asked the Department of Homeland Security to look into the issue instead.


“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” a statement from the president said. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission.”

The commission was the focus of heated contention even before it was formally announced in May with Vice President Mike Pence as the chairman and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chairman. Democrats urged Trump to abandon the idea altogether, but the president chose to press forward.

The White House struggled to find Democrats willing to give the effort a bipartisan patina after prominent party leaders denounced the effort as an attempt to give respectability to Trump’s assertion that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016, a volume that the president suggested accounted for Hillary Clinton’s decisive win in the popular vote.

Democrats and liberal groups rejoiced over the commission's demise Wednesday, but in an interview with POLITICO Wednesday night, Kobach said that exuberance is misplaced.

"Anyone on the left needs to realize that by throwing the food in the air, they just lost a seat at the table," Kobach said.

The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission's work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president's decision.

"It’s the right move," Kobach said. "It's a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done."

Kobach acknowledged that ICE has little expertise in other types of potential voter fraud, such as multiple voting or voting by felons who've been disenfranchised, but he noted DHS has a broad mandate to address election security issues as critical U.S. infrastructure.

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White House officials laid blame Wednesday less with Democrats than with the ex-colleague they said was responsible for its creation: former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was slammed in a statement by Trump on Wednesday after accusing Donald Trump Jr. of treason.

Bannon insisted on the commission’s creation, and pushed hard for it, one White House official said.

“This was his idea, and it was not a good one,” the official said.

The commission was a “blundered Bannon rollout” and “should’ve never been in place,” another person familiar with the effort said.

It was just hours after Trump said in a statement that Bannon had “lost his mind” that the White House announced that the commission would be no more.

“Steve Bannon was immensely focused on the voter fraud commission,” a person familiar with the commission said. “It struck me as a strong signal to something he was very passionate about when he was in the White House.”

The pro-Trump website Breitbart News, which was led by Bannon before he joined Trump’s campaign and which he has since rejoined, has been vocal in pushing allegations of mass voter fraud. Kobach, who led the commission, had written paid columns for Breitbart.

Democrats expressed elation over the White House’s decision to shutter the panel. Some even suggested it might set a precedent for turning back some of the Trump White House’s initiatives.

“The commission never had anything to do with election integrity,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “It was instead a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other. This shows that ill-founded proposals that just appeal to a narrow group of people won’t work, and we hope they’ll learn this lesson elsewhere.”

Trump’s statement on dissolving the commission alluded to a flood of litigation the panel was hit with early on, much of it triggered by a request that Kobach issued for all states to provide their voter rolls along with information on citizens’ criminal convictions and even partial Social Security numbers. The White House stressed that it was seeking only publicly available records, but the broad call for data drew an angry reaction from some state officials and raised concerns about how the personal information would be stored and safeguarded.

"Our staff was spending more time dealing with lawsuits than doing the actual work of the commission," Kobach said. "The left didn't want the commission to find out anything."

The panel ultimately met in person only twice, in the White House complex in July and at a New Hampshire college in September. The latter meeting was overshadowed by a dispute between Kobach and another panel member who was hosting the session, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner.

After Kobach suggested in a Breitbart column that illegal, out-of-state voters swung the close U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire to Democrat Maggie Hassan and away from Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, Gardner insisted that Kobach had his facts wrong and should have done more research before leveling such a claim.

In November, the commission was sued by one of its own members — Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap — who alleged he was being frozen out of meeting planning and denied access to the panel’s records.

Last month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that found substance in Dunlap’s claims and ordered that he be given information needed to participate fully in the group’s deliberations.

The panel was also beset by other problems, including the arrest in October of one of its staff members, researcher Ronald Williams II, on child pornography charges. A few days later, one of the commission’s members, former Democratic Arkansas state legislator David Dunn, 52, died unexpectedly after heart surgery.

Commission officials acknowledged that the setbacks and the litigation eventually ground the panel’s work to a near-halt in recent months, making a target to release a report this spring unrealistic. However, as recently as last week, Kobach indicated publicly that he expected the group to meet again sometime this month.

Dunlap said he learned of the commission's dissolution Wednesday the same way reporters did: via a news release.

"There was no warning. They didn't give us a heads up that the president's considering shutting it down or anything like that," he told POLITICO.

However, the Maine official said he had a sense in recent weeks that the panel might have met for the last time.

"When we got that court ruling, I thought maybe they'll just throw the commission in the of corner and take this on through some other tack," Dunlap said. He said he's concerned that moving the project to DHS could remove some the public and congressional oversight available through the commission.

Some Democrats criticized Dunlap for agreeing to join the panel last year, but he said he's still comfortable with the decision.

"It's been a strange ride, to say the least," he said, adding, "I don't have any regrets."