RNC plan for 2020 denialist to head ‘election integrity’ unit raises alarms

As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has cemented its hold on the Republican National Committee (RNC), alarms are being raised about the organisation’s tapping of the fervent election denialist Christina Bobb to run an “election integrity” unit.

Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.

Bobb helped spread phoney voting fraud claims with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former campaign operative Mike Roman, both of whom along with Trump and others face charges in Fulton county, Georgia, of conspiring to overturn Biden’s win there; Bobb was not charged.

Last year Bobb wrote Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024, a book that was chock full of baseless charges about 2020 election fraud.

Former judges, ex-Republican congressmen and election watchdogs voice strong concerns about Bobb’s mission and the potential dangers posed by her flood of erroneous charges of voting fraud.

“By designating Bobb to the RNC post, they’re beginning to promulgate the same false narrative of widespread election fraud that we saw in 2020 and 2021 but way earlier,” said John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania and now president of Dickinson College.

“There’s a concept known as illusory truth,” he added. “If you keep saying these same falsehoods over and over, people begin to believe they’re true, and it has the potential to morph into violence. That puts judges, prosecutors and others at risk.”

The RNC’s hiring of