The state board issued a new round of subpoenas in the hours before its dissolution. And in a letter on Friday, Joshua D. Malcolm, the Democrat who was chairman of the elections board, complained that Mr. Harris’s campaign had not been sufficiently responsive to a subpoena that was served weeks ago.
Mr. Malcolm said investigators had received 398 pages of campaign records — and believed there were about 140,000 other documents that could be of value to investigators but had not been made available.
“You are hereby requested to fully comply with the board’s subpoena so as to not further impact the agency’s ability to resolve the investigation,” Mr. Malcolm wrote in his letter to Mr. Harris’s campaign.
In a statement on Friday, a lawyer for Mr. Harris, David B. Freedman, said that the Republican candidate and his campaign had “cooperated fully with the investigation.”
Mr. Harris has denied wrongdoing but acknowledged this month that he had directed the hiring of Mr. Dowless, a political operative from Bladen County who had previously been scrutinized by the authorities for possible election tampering. No one, including Mr. Dowless, has been charged in connection with this year’s allegations, and Mr. Dowless, who has declined to comment, rejected a request to meet with state investigators.
Those investigators had been expected to present their findings at an elections board hearing on Jan. 11. After reviewing evidence at that hearing, the state board was expected to determine whether to order a new election under a North Carolina law that allows a new vote if “irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.”
But plans for the January hearing, and the fate of the board, eventually ran headlong into a case that dealt with the constitutionality of the elections board’s design. On Thursday night, in a decision that stunned North Carolina Democrats and Republicans alike, a three-judge panel angrily rejected a bipartisan request to extend the life of the board temporarily.
from Just News Update http://bit.ly/2RoFXho
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