Fox & Friends' Voter Fraud Expert Is A Conspiracy Theorist Who Claimed The DOJ Was Hostile To White People

Written by Media Matters Staff

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Fox News' Steve Doocy hosted discredited right-wing fabulist and former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams, who claimed that “we have four million … ineligible and dead voters on American voter rolls,” which will ”affect the election." Adams’ appearance on Fox comes as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has pushed unsubstantiated claims of “large scale voter fraud.” In fact, one study found only 31 instances of potential voter fraud in 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014, and, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, most cases of alleged voter fraud by dead people are not true. While “there are a handful of cases in which documentation shows that votes have been cast in the names of voters who have died before the vote was submitted” the more common answer is that there was a clerical error or people with the same name were mixed up. Adams also failed to acknowledge that, although voter rolls may include some dead people, that doesn’t mean votes are being cast in their names. 

Adams became a right-wing media favorite after he resigned from the Department of Justice upon its decision not to pursue voter-intimidation charges against members of the New Black Panther Party, claiming they were “hostil[e] ... to bringing cases on behalf of white victims for the benefit of national racial minorities.” Adams frequently took to right-wing media, particularly Fox's America Live with Megyn Kelly, to push the phony scandal that the Justice Department dismissed the charges out of a “fixation on racial grievance.” The Department of Justice's ethics office found “no evidence” to support his claims, and he has been thoroughly discredited as a Republican activist. From the October 18 edition of Fox & Friends:

STEVE DOOCY (HOST): Dead people voting, we know it happens from time to time, and Rudy Giuliani told CNN that the dead prefer Democrats. But is that true? Election lawyer and former attorney for the voting rights section of the U.S. Department of Justice, J. Christian Adams, joins us right now. J. Christian, you have handled some dead voting people cases in the past, haven't you? 

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Yeah, I filed six in just the last year against Philadelphia, Broward County, Florida, is pending. Places where the voter rolls are corrupted, and we had one case where in Texas there was somebody on the voter rolls who died in 1944. 

DOOCY: Oh man.

ADAMS: Dead people are voting, and it's something that this administration isn't doing anything about. 

DOOCY: Why is that? 

ADAMS: Well, they must like it. They must like who they're voting for. Look, when I was at the Justice Department in the Bush administration, we enforced a law called “motor voter” that forced states and local election officials to clean up their voter rolls of dead people. When I was there, we shut it down after the Obama inauguration. We would not bring cases because these people are opposed to cleaning the voter rolls. Why is that? Well, now we have four million, four million Steve, ineligible and dead voters on American voter rolls according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. That's too many, and it's going to affect the election. 

DOOCY: Two million is a big number. J. Christian, everybody is going, mainstream media, it's not rigged. You don't have to worry about dead people voting. Are you saying those people are wrong? 

ADAMS: Yeah. They're covering up criminal activity. Groups like the League of Women Voters and the SEIU are intervening in my lawsuits to try to stop voter roll clean ups because they like it the way it is. They like people -- there is a case in Oregon, Lafayette Keaton voted for his dead son. Why wasn't he prosecuted by the Justice Department? That's the other problem. The Obama administration is not prosecuting voter fraud. If you stopped giving traffic tickets, what would happen to the highways? 

DOOCY: Exactly. Exit question: is Rudy right? Most dead people wind up voting for Democrats?

ADAMS: Well, look, all I can say is you have to commit a crime. You'd be a criminal if you voted for somebody who's dead, which by the way is very easy to do in most places, especially those without voter I.D. or vote by mail. So whether or not criminals tend to vote for Democrats, there's plenty of social science data on that.