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Trump’s voting commission broke the law with personal email use, lawsuit claims

Trump’s voting commission broke the law with personal email use, lawsuit claims

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As part of a new legal filing in a lawsuit over President Trump’s controversial “election integrity” commission, a group of lawyers says some members of the commission used personal email to conduct government business, possibly in violation of federal records laws.

Lawsuit first filed against the commission in July

The filing, entered this week as a joint status report, is part of a suit brought against the commission by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The suit, filed in July, argues that the commission failed to produce documents it was required to release to the public.

As part of the suit, the commission has agreed to some disclosures. But in the filing, the Lawyers’ Committee writes that, during a phone conference, “Defendants’ counsel indicated that members of the Commission have been using personal email accounts rather than federal government systems,” which may be a violation of records laws. The group goes on to claim that the commission hasn’t satisfactorily explained how they’ll search and produce records related to the email accounts.

In response, the voting commission members said through lawyers that they didn’t “recall making any definitive statements as to email addresses being used by non-federal commissioners.”

Trump convened the election integrity commission after falsely claiming that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. The committee, designed to investigate allegations of voter fraud, requested enormous amounts of voting data from around the country, which earned the commission a rebuke from many states.