WASHINGTON — The top elections official for the state of New Mexico spoke with federal prosecutors as part of the special counsel’s investigation into the 2020 election, the official’s spokesman said Friday.
The meeting with New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver occurred sometime in recent months, according to spokesman Alex Curtas, who declined to comment further.
The Justice Department has spent months examining lobbying campaigns by Trump associates aimed at getting Democrat Joe Biden to win key states to undo his election results. Special counsel Jack Smith and his team have issued subpoenas to election officials in states Trump contested, seeking correspondence from Trump associates and campaign aides, and have also arranged interviews in recent months with state officials.
The communications with state officials are one part of a much larger investigation by Smith and his team into efforts to block the transfer of power from Trump to Biden. It’s unclear when Smith’s investigation into the lead-up to the January 6, 2021 riots might end or if anyone could be charged.
A Smith spokesman declined to comment Friday.
It is unknown what questions Toulouse Oliver, a second-term Democrat, was asked about the 2020 New Mexico election.
After Biden carried the state by nearly 11 percentage points, the Trump campaign briefly challenged the results in court before dropping the lawsuit. Republicans in the state produced fake Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the winner, though the fake voters added a caveat saying the certificates were produced in the event they were later recognized as duly chosen and qualified electors.
Although Democrats control all elected offices in the entire state of New Mexico, with majorities in the state House, false claims of voting fraud and tampering in 2020 have resonated with some politically conservative communities, including Otero County. , where the commissioners in June 2022 initially refused to certify the elections. results.
Last year, former Otero County Commissioner and Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin was barred from public office for participating in an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson also spoke with officials in Smith’s office in recent months, according to their staff.
Kathy Boockvar, the top state elections official in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election, said Friday she had not been asked for an interview.
It was currently unclear whether state officials overseeing the 2020 elections in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, other states fought over by Trump, have been interviewed. Claire Woodall-Vogg, director of the Milwaukee election commission, said in an email that she met virtually with investigators a month or two ago.
“I’m not sure what details I can divulge, so there’s not much more to say,” she said.
Efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his defeat in Georgia are also the subject of a separate investigation in Atlanta’s Fulton County and local prosecutors say they expect a decision later this summer on next steps. It was in a January 2, 2021 phone call that Trump suggested that Raffensperger could help “find” the votes needed to reverse Biden’s victory.
