Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump dissolved his much-touted voter fraud commission on Wednesday, attributing the step to various states' refusal to participate in the board, which was criticized as a misguided step to solve a practically non-existent problem.

"Many mostly Democrat States refused to hand over data from the 2016 Election to the Commission On Voter Fraud. They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.," Trump said in a Thursday morning tweet.

Many mostly Democrat States refused to hand over data from the 2016 Election to the Commission On Voter Fraud. They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.

In the wake of the announcement, advisers outlined hesitation from within the White House for months about the commission.

"It's a s--t show," said one White House adviser to CNN, adding that the commission went "off the rails."

Trump established the commission in May after claiming without evidence that massive voter fraud had cost him the popular vote, and he appointed Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to lead the panel.

But after months went by and the commission faced pushback from officials across the country, civil rights advocates and even a member of the commission itself -- as well as an unclear mandate, according to the White House official -- Trump pulled the plug Wednesday.

In a statement, the White House said dissolving the commission would avoid "endless legal battles at taxpayer expense," adding that Trump has asked the Department of Homeland Security to determine future action.

Another White House official familiar with the matter said the commission was unable to operate as structured under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. That law mandates a degree of transparency around commission activities and was the subject of litigation against it.

The White House says the Department of Homeland Security will take up the issue, and a spokesman for the department said its focus was on election security.

"At the President's direction, the Department continues to work in support of state governments who are responsible for administering elections, with efforts focused on securing elections against those who seek to undermine the election system or its integrity," DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton told CNN.

Houlton added that "Mr. Kobach is not advising the Department on this matter."

That contradicts Kobach, who told The New York Times he would be an informal adviser to the department.

A controversial task from the start

The commission has been beset by controversy virtually since it began.

Critics contended Trump was simply finding a way to account for his popular vote loss in the 2016 presidential election, and one White House adviser expressed a belief that Trump simply wanted the commission to deliver a report saying voter fraud is a problem and to offer some directives to address it.

Another senior White House official acknowledged bringing on Kobach was controversial.

"He's a lightning rod," the official said.

A source close to Pence said chairing the commission "wasn't something that (Pence) asked for," but that the vice president has a "workman-like attitude" about these things, and so he took on the job.

The source said Trump wanted Kobach involved in the commission with the understanding that while Pence would share the chairing role with Kobach, it would be Kobach who would run the commission day-to-day.

Treat 'it like a book report'

The panel requested wide-reaching information about voters in every state, including dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. The request was met with swift and strong opposition by many state election officials , setting off a series of lawsuits over privacy, and requests were eventually scaled back.

There was even concern among some in the White House that some of the requests from the commission, including asking for voter rolls, crossed legal boundaries and might not have been that well thought out before they were announced publicly.

The senior adviser lamented how far down the road the White House and Vice President's office had gotten with the commission.

"VP's team, though, should have seen that assignment as a s--t sandwich and treated it like a book report," the adviser said. "Avoid trouble, cite real instances of voter fraud, address structural and technology problems, make recommendations and move on."

A spokeswoman for Pence's office referred inquiries about the commission's dissolution to the White House statement.

JUST WATCHED Fact-checking Trump's claims on voter fraud Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Fact-checking Trump's claims on voter fraud 04:06

Statements stoking outrage

Shortly after his shocking win in the 2016 presidential election, Trump asserted via Twitter, without evidence, that he would have won the popular vote had millions not voted illegally.

"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," he said.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

The President also named hard-liners to the panel who were known for their strong belief in widespread voter fraud, despite no research supporting the idea that fraudulent voting has been substantial in almost any election.

One of those members, the Heritage Foundation's Hans Von Spakovsky, had also sent an email to the Justice Department prior to his appointment urging the government to not include any Democrats on the panel. The email was later made public.

"We will probably never know the answer to that question," Kobach said on MSNBC. "Because even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example, you wouldn't know how they voted."

Kobach again faced heat from state officials for statements he made within New Hampshire about New Hampshire's election practices . Those statements were part of the commission's last formal public meeting and drew further outrage from Democrats.

Legal challenges

Eventually, one Democratic member of the commission went public with his complaints that the commission was not including its Democratic members and his concern that it existed to substantiate Trump's prior assertion, without evidence, that mass voter fraud took place in the 2016 election.

That Democratic member, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap , went to federal court to sue the commission and compel it to provide him with documents.

The US District Court in Washington sided with Dunlap in the lawsuit, which the commission's executive director, Andrew Kossack, previously said had "no merit," and ordered the commission to provide Dunlap with the information on commission activities and communications he requested.

JUST WATCHED Kobach: Not trying to prove Trump's claims Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Kobach: Not trying to prove Trump's claims 01:53

On those recent headlines for the commission, the source close to the vice president admitted, "A member of the commission suing the commission is not ideal."

Groups opposed to the commission hailed the White House shuttering the group.

Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law executive director Kristen Clarke told CNN it was important for advocates to remain vigilant and cited Trump's repeated revisions to the travel ban as an example.

"This administration has a track record of refurbishing and reissuing old discriminatory policies as we have seen with the Muslim Ban," Clarke said.

Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU's project on voting rights, said in a statement that the commission "was a sham from a start."

Likewise, Brennan Center for Justice president Michael Waldman said the commission "started as a tragedy and ended as a farce."</s>Once they were America's oddest political couple, the flaming dotard Donald Trump and the grubby boozer Steve Bannon.

Five months ago, after he fired Bannon, Trump couldn't say enough nice things about his alt-right buddy.

Now he's saying that the day Bannon was fired, he didn't just lose his job, he lost his mind.

As someone at the New York Daily News said, life comes at you fast.

And now it's a cuck fight.

President Trump excommunicated his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, from his circle on Wednesday, ending for now a partnership of convenience that transformed American politics while raising questions about the future of the nationalist-populist movement they cultivated together.

Late Wednesday, lawyers for Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon, arguing he violated the employment agreement he signed with the Trump Organization in numerous ways and also likely defamed the president. They ordered that he stop communicating either confidential and or disparaging information, and preserve all records in preparation for “imminent” legal action.

While over at Breitbart, where Bannon rules the roost,

In his first comments after being blasted by President Donald Trump earlier in the day, Steve Bannon called Trump "a great man" while hosting a radio show Wednesday night.

"The President of the United States is a great man," he said. "You know, I support him day in and day out."

While no doubt waiting to see which way the wind blows...

But in a sense it doesn't really matter who wins this power struggle. When Trump's base is only about thirty percent, any infighting could be fatal.

What Michael Wolff's book reveals, once again, is that Trump is unfit to be President.

For a couple of years, it has been apparent to anyone who cared to look hard that Trump was never mentally, emotionally or temperamentally fit to be president. Those who argued that character didn’t matter were both wrong and missing the point. Sanity matters. The book — at least from the excerpts — confirms what dogged opponents of his presidency have always said: He’s an unhinged man-child utterly lacking in the skill needed to be president.

The only argument should be over how and when he should be removed from office.

More than a dozen lawmakers last month met with a Yale University psychiatry professor for two days to discuss President Trump’s fitness for office, Politico reported Wednesday. Dr. Bandy X. Lee reportedly met with the group of lawmakers on Dec. 5 and Dec. 6 and warned them the president is “going to unravel.”

Donald Trump is unravelling. He doesn't know what he's doing.

And he must be removed from office.

Before he kills us all...</s>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Wednesday shut down a presidential commission charged with looking into allegations of electoral fraud during the 2016 election, after many states refused to provide it with data, the White House said.

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” Trump said in a statement.

The panel, headed by Vice President Mike Pence, was established in May last year to look into voter fraud but met with resistance from many states.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., noted in July that the commission was an advisory body that lacked legal authority to compel states to hand over data.

Trump, a Republican, has said that fraud may have accounted for his loss nationwide in the popular vote to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.

Most state officials who oversee elections and election law experts say that voter fraud is rare in the United States.

(Corrects month in paragraph four)</s>The post Pakistán “refugia terroristas”: Donald Trump appeared first on Almomento.Mx.</s>WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is disbanding his controversial voter fraud commission amid infighting, lawsuits and state officials’ refusal to co-operate.

Trump convened the commission to investigate the 2016 presidential election, after alleging repeatedly and without evidence that voting fraud cost him the popular vote. Trump won the Electoral College.

The White House blamed the decision to end the panel on more than a dozen states that have refused to comply with the commission’s demand for reams of personal voter data, including names, partial Social Security numbers, voting histories and party affiliations.

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Wednesday.

READ MORE: Donald Trump launches commission to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud

Critics saw the commission as part of a conservative campaign to make it harder for poor people and minority voters to access the ballot box, and to justify Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

Trump has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election, delivering the popular vote to his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Clinton received more than 2.8 million more votes than Trump nationwide.

While there have been isolated cases of voter fraud in the U.S., past studies have found it to be exceptionally rare.

Critics also viewed the commission as part of an attempt to distract from the ongoing investigations into Russian election meddling and potential collusion between Moscow and Trump campaign aides. The intelligence community concluded that the Russian government mounted a campaign to help Trump win, hacking email accounts and spreading false stories.

READ MORE: 52 per cent of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 election because of voter fraud: poll

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a conservative Republican and the commission’s vice chairman, characterized the decision to dissolve the bipartisan group as a “tactical change” and argued DHS can pursue an investigation of election fraud more quickly and efficiently.

“The Democrats, both on and off the commission, made very clear that they were not interested in determining the scope and extent of voter fraud and, indeed, they were trying to stop the commission in its tracks,” Kobach said. “The Democrats lost their opportunity, lost their seat at the table, by stonewalling.”

Kobach, a vocal supporter of tough voter ID laws, alleged Democrats wanted no investigation. “Their motto is, ‘Nothing to see here,”‘ he said.

One of the members of the commission, Democratic Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, sued the commission in federal court, alleging it had violated federal law by refusing to provide him documents available to other members, among other charges.

WATCH: In February, President Donald Trump stood by his statements of alleged voter fraud.

Dunlap on Wednesday said Kobach and his allies “were the ones that were stonewalling,” saying they had “very definite ideas of what they wanted this commission to come up with.”

Three Democratic senators – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota – had also asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate the commission, which it agreed to do in October.

Kobach said he intends to work closely with DHS and the White House and expects the bulk of the DHS investigation to be done by midsummer.

More than a dozen states, as well as the District of Columbia, had rebuffed the commission’s request for voter data, citing privacy concerns and a fear that complying would legitimize the idea that voter fraud is widespread.

READ MORE: ‘This battle is not over’: Roy Moore still refusing to concede Alabama Senate race

While there have been isolated cases of people voting illegally, and many voter rolls contain outdated data, there is no evidence voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States or has affected election results.

A study by a Loyola Law School professor found that out of 1 billion votes cast in all American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 known cases of impersonation fraud.

During the commission’s first meeting, Trump had questioned the motives of states that refused to comply with the commission’s request, suggesting they had something to hide.

READ MORE: Republican Jeff Flake warns Trump he could face GOP challenge for 2020 nomination

“It is no surprise that a commission founded on a lie of widespread voter fraud proved to be a fraud itself,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, who had refused to comply with the commission’s request for voter data. “No taxpayer dollars should have been wasted on Mr. Trump’s voter suppression crusade.”

Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project, accused the commission of engaging in “a wild-goose chase for voter fraud, demonizing the very American voters whom we should all be helping to participate – with the not-so-secret goal of making voting harder with unnecessary barriers.

“President Trump has tried and failed to spread his own fake news about voter fraud,” Ho said.</s>(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has signed an executive order disbanding his voter fraud commission.

A White House statement is blaming the decision on numerous states that have refused to provide voter information to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders says that, “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense,” Trump has signed an order to dissolve the commission and asked the Department of Homeland Security to determine the administration’s next steps.

Critics saw the commission as part of a conservative campaign to strip minority voters and poor people from the voter rolls, and to justify unfounded claims made by Trump that voter fraud cost him the popular vote in 2016.

Past studies have found voter fraud to be exceptionally rare.</s>US President Donald Trump has dissolved a controversial commission he had set up to investigate illegal voting in the 2016 election, attributing the move to various states' refusal to participate in the board.

Trump had established the commission in May after claiming without evidence that massive voter fraud had cost him the popular vote in the presidential election, and he appointed Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to lead the panel.

His rival Hillary Clinton won three million more votes overall than Trump in results that were certified by the Federal Election Commission.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump had decided to dissolve the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity "rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense".

"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," Sanders said.

"Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action," Sanders said.

From the start, Trumps voter fraud commission was hobbled by the refusal of most states to share voters’ information and beset by legal challenges — including one filed by a commission member, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap. State election officials rejected requests for their voter rolls as invasions of privacy.

Senator Chuck, Senate Minority Leader, said that the commission never had anything to do with election integrity.</s>President Trump dissolved his voter integrity commission Wednesday and ordered the Homeland Security Department to take up the job instead, in a move his backers said could speed up an investigation of the extent of voter fraud.

Mr. Trump decided the commission had become mired in legal challenges and it was a waste of money to continue, when much of the same work could be performed by existing federal agencies.

Democrats and liberal activists claimed victory, saying they stopped a threat to democracy by derailing the panel, known officially as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

But Kris Kobach, who was vice chairman of the panel, said Democrats come out behind because the commission’s work will continue but will be completed without any input from Democrats, who had been part of the commission but won’t have a say in Homeland Security’s work.

“It will get done faster, but the Democrats no longer have a seat at the table,” Mr. Kobach said. “If they think this is a victory for the left, they are wrong.”

The White House announced the president’s decision in a statement late Wednesday evening, saying Mr. Trump signed an executive order bringing the 8-month-old effort to an end.

“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,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action.”

Mr. Trump had set up the commission, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, to investigate his postelection claims that voter fraud is a massive problem that cut into his 2016 vote margins.

The panel struggled from the start, however, with Democratic state officials refusing to comply with requests for public voter roll data that in many cases can be easily bought.

At least eight lawsuits were filed to try to derail the commission, accusing it of violating open-records laws or breaking privacy protections by asking for the state voter data.

One of the lawsuits was even filed by a panel member, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of five Democrats on the commission. Mr. Dunlap had accused the commission of hiding information from him.

A federal judge last month agreed, ordering the commission to be more forthcoming.

The commission said it wasn’t hiding any information and that its business had dried up after a series of mishaps.

One panel researcher was arrested on charges of child pornography, while a commissioner, former Arkansas state Rep. David Dunn, died in October. His name was still listed on the commission’s website as of Wednesday.

The commission, created in May, held just two meetings — one in July and another in September.

Although the commission’s work wasn’t completed, Mr. Kobach said, members were able to highlight some information, such as 8,500 documented cases of double-voting in elections in 21 states and 1,000 convictions for voter fraud since 2000.

But the biggest job of the commission was to obtain voter data from states and compare it to Homeland Security databases to determine the extent of noncitizens’ registration and voting.

Mr. Kobach said given the hurdles the commission faced, it made sense for the president to ask the department to complete the investigation.

“DHS can do it more freely and efficiently than a commission can,” Mr. Kobach said. “The most important info that only the DHS can provide is how many aliens we have on the voter rolls.”

Such a count has been difficult to come by over the years, though efforts by some nongovernmental groups have exposed scattered instances.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, run by J. Christian Adams, who was also a member of the Trump voter commission, found thousands of self-admitted noncitizens who registered to vote in Philadelphia, Virginia and New Jersey. In many of the cases, the noncitizens cast illegal ballots.

Democrats and liberal activists reacted with glee to Mr. Trump’s announcement.

“This is a major victory for every activist who has called out this sham commission for what it is. Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Marge Baker, executive vice president of People for the American Way.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said the panel was ill-founded from the start and that he hoped the president learned a lesson from having to make an about-face.

“The commission never had anything to do with election integrity. 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,” Mr. Schumer said.

The Brennan Center, which filed some of the lawsuits trying to stop the commission, said its demise proves there was never any evidence of voter fraud in the first place.

Mr. Kobach said the commission wasn’t a mistake but that the level of opposition made clear it was going to be a morass.

“The fact that the commission encountered so many lawsuits and such resistance illustrates just how the partisan left is determined to obstruct the gaining of information about the extent of voter fraud,” he said.</s>WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Donald Trump dissolved his much-touted voter fraud commission on Wednesday, attributing the step to various states’ refusal to participate in the board, which was criticized as a misguided step to solve a practically non-existent problem.

Trump established the commission in May, citing what he claimed were widespread accounts of falsified voting. The panel requested wide-reaching information about voters in every state, including dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers.

“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,” the White House said in a statement. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.”

Critics contended Trump was simply finding a way to account for his popular vote loss in the 2016 presidential election.

The commission has been beset by controversy virtually since it began. A request for voter files from every state was met with swift and strong opposition by many state election officials, setting off a series of lawsuits over privacy, and requests were eventually scaled back.

Trump also named hard-liners to the panel who were known for their strong belief in widespread voter fraud, despite no research supporting the idea that fraudulent voting has been substantial in almost any election.

One of those members, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans Von Spakovsky, had also sent an email to the Justice Department prior to his appointment urging the government to not include any Democrats on the panel. The email was later made public.

Last summer, Kris Kobach, the panel’s vice chair, declined to say if Clinton won the popular vote in 2016.

“We will probably never know the answer to that question,” Kobach said on MSNBC. “Because even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example, you wouldn’t know how they voted.”

Kobach again faced heat from state officials for statements he made within New Hampshire about New Hampshire’s election practices. Those statements were part of the commission’s last formal public meeting and drew further outrage from Democrats.

Eventually, one Democratic member of the commission went public with his complaints that the commission was not including its Democratic members and his concern that it existed to substantiate Trump’s prior assertion, without evidence, that mass voter fraud took place in the 2016 election.

That Democratic member, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, went to federal court to sue the commission and compel it to provide him with documents.

The US District Court in Washington sided with Dunlap in the lawsuit, which the commission’s executive director, Andrew Kossack, previously said had “no merit,” and ordered the commission to provide Dunlap with the information on commission activities and communications he requested.</s>President Donald Trump is dissolving the voter fraud commission which was founded to investigate Trump’s baseless claim that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote after states refused to turn over sensitive voter information to the commission.

On Wednesday, the White House announced that Trump is dissolving his voter fraud commission after states failed to hand over requested voter information. The order brought an abrupt end to the controversial commission her created last May 2017, The Hill reported.

The U.S. president is blaming the lack of substantial evidence according to the statement issued by the White House, saying, “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.”

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” Trump added.

Trump created the bipartisan commission by executive order in May to investigate the widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election. He has repeatedly complained about this vulgar accusation that thousands of people voted illegally in the 2016 election depriving him the opportunity to win the popular vote. However, it was later on that the public learned that the then-Candidate Trump has no evidence to support his claims.

According to ForexTV, critics called his baseless rants, which basically became the central topic of most of his campaign, a tool to restrict voting rights. If this accusation is proven to be truthful, then such tactic cemented his place in the 2016 Presidential Elections.

In addition, some leading Republicans figures, including Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), also urged Trump last year to drop his claims of widespread fraud.

The announcement of the panels disbandment created a massive media frenzy in the White House which is currently on the edge of the rope trying to pull back their hold on former Trump strategist Steve Bannon who threw explosive criticism of the president and the first family in his new book.

Moreover, the announcement also came after Trump’s openly mocked North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on Twitter regarding the size of his “nuclear button.” The tweet erupted to a collective fear of Pyongyang’s reaction to which the U.S. is currently locked in a deadly conflict that could lead to another nuclear war.
U.S. President Donald Trump dissolves the voter fraud commission noting the cost to the public of litigating against lawsuits from states objecting to the voter information requested.