March 21, 2022: -North Carolina authorities had opened an investigation into possible voter fraud by Mark Meadows related to his claim that his legal residence was a mobile home when serving as White House chief of staff to then-President Donald Trump, the state attorney general’s office said on Thursday.

“The allegations involve potential crimes committed by a government official,” wrote Macon County, North Carolina, District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch in a letter on Monday to the attorney general’s office, which asks that it designate agencies to investigate Meadows.

A spokesperson for Attorney General Josh Stein told CNBC, “we have agreed to request” to take over the probe.

“We have asked them to investigate, and after the investigation, we’ll review their findings,” said Nazneen Ahmed, Stein’s spokesperson.

The probe was sparked by a New Yorker magazine article on March 6 that questioned the legitimacy of Meadows’ voter registration in North Carolina in September 2020. Meadows said on the roster that he lived in a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, measuring 14-by-62 feet.

The New Yorker reported that the former Republican congressperson “does not own this property and never has” and that it was not clear if he had spent a single night there. According to the magazine, meadows’ wife, Debbie, had rented the residence once in the past several years.

When Mark Meadows registered to vote on September 19, 2020, the magazine noted that he listed his move-in date for the following day at the mobile home.

State law requires voters to live at their registered address for 30 days before the election they vote. Lying on voter registrations is a felony.

Trump had lost his bid for re-election in November 2020 to President Joe Biden, has falsely claimed that he was swindled out of a second term in the White House by widespread ballot fraud in a few swing states.

Meadows was on the phone line with Trump when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger in January 2021 to “find” enough votes in that state for him to overturn victory there.

The probe of Meadows by North Carolina authorities was first reported by The News & Observer newspaper.

On Thursday, Meadows was not in the office at the Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, where he is a senior partner. A CPI staffer said she would forward CNBC.

Meadows voted by absentee ballot in North Carolina in the November 2020 presidential election. Trump won that state, by a margin of slightly more than 1%,”