The White House does not have any immediate timeline for President Donald Trump’s voter fraud investigation and the commission he was adamant about creating during his first few weeks in office, even as the administration approaches the end of its 100 days.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer told CNN that he expects something on the commission within the “next week or two, but I don’t want to get ahead of that.”
Spicer said there would not be an executive order (as the President originally wanted) and in lieu of that there would be a commission headed up by Vice President Mike Pence. Spicer did say that the vice president will still be “very involved” in the investigation.
Another senior administration official said that the formation of the commission “has not been a topic of a lot of conversation” in the White House, and said it was not something discussed recently with the vice president either.
Trump has repeatedly asserted, without providing any evidence, that three to five million people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election — similar to the margin of Clinton’s popular vote victory over Trump.
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he tweeted in late November.
Trump was initially set to sign an executive order looking into the alleged voter fraud on January 26, a few days after taking office. Reporters and photographers were summoned to the West Wing to document the signing, but waited for about 30 minutes amid confusion from aides. At the time, Spicer said the President “got jammed up on some meetings that needed to occur” and that the order would be signed in the next day or two.
In February, one aide said the President was waiting until then-Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general before launching an investigation.
The President was asked about the claims again on March 22 during an interview with TIME about truth and falsehoods. He was asked about this disputed claim, which he said he would “be proved right about that, too.”
“We’ll see after the committee. I have people say it was more than that. We will see after we have. But there will be, we are forming a committee. And we are going to do a study on it, a very serious problem,” Trump told the magazine.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in February that no federal money should be spent investigating voter fraud.
“There’s no evidence that it occurred in such a significant number that would have changed the presidential election, and I don’t think we ought to spend any federal money investigating that,” the Kentucky Republican told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
After Trump reportedly told several senators in a February private White House meeting much of the fraud took place in New Hampshire, White House aide Stephen Miller repeated the claim on television.
But many people in New Hampshire responded, voicing confusion and anger.
Former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Fergus Cullen took to Twitter to offer a $1,000 reward for evidence of a single illegal vote in New Hampshire by someone coming from Massachusetts. He said no one had offered evidence, and in an interview with CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, he blasted the White House’s claim.
“The idea that people are coming to New Hampshire to commit fraud on a massive scale like this is just preposterous and it needs to be called out as untrue,” Cullen said.
The New Hampshire secretary of state’s office said it had not received any complaints of voter fraud.