“Susie forwarded your meeting request along to me and requested that I connect you with Ed Martin.” That is Cam Sadler, then chief of operations for White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, writing on August 19, 2025, to Will Huff, an Arkansas election-denial activist. The email is among Justice Department records released by the watchdog group American Oversight under a Freedom of Information Act request and reported by CNN.
Sadler described Martin, then the pardon attorney and head of the Weaponization Working Group, as the White House’s “Election Integrity czar” who “has his finger on the pulse of our efforts.” Huff answered that “Susie and I spoke about election security and moving forward and she agreed we need to be ready for the 2026 primary elections.”
The meeting at DOJ
Martin, Huff and Huff’s podcast co-host, Colonel Conrad Reynolds, met three days later, on August 22, at Justice Department headquarters. At that point the Arkansas Board of Election Commissioners had already referred Reynolds to the state attorney general over alleged violations of state election law. He has since been charged. The two men’s podcast leans heavily on election conspiracy theories and opposition to voting machines.
Huff’s “meeting recap” email to Martin the next day listed what the activists wanted the White House to adopt as policy: hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots, an end to most mail and absentee voting, and early voting cut to as little as a single day.
The machine plan
The technical core of the pitch was Executive Order 13873, which authorises the Commerce secretary to restrict technology tied to “foreign adversaries” on national-security grounds. Huff wrote that it lets Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “revoke the purchase and use of critical infrastructure that contains components from adversarial nations,” which “can immediately force states to move to hand-marked and hand-counted ballots like the President wishes.”
The same email said the group discussed using Reynolds and Huff as “conduits to the election officials around the nation.” In a separate exchange, Reynolds wrote that he and Huff were working on a “realistic Course of Action” in response to Martin’s request for a plan to get Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted on state charges over a 2020 voting-system security breach, into federal custody.
In an August 2026 podcast episode, Reynolds said Lutnick gave them “two-and-a-half-hours of his time” and “would be getting on it.” A Commerce Department spokesperson said in May 2026 that Lutnick “never met or discussed election-integrity issues” with the officials involved. A parallel push by White House adviser Kurt Olsen to have some voting-machine components declared a security risk collapsed after a teardown of machines seized in Puerto Rico found no sign of foreign tampering. The White House, Commerce, Reynolds and Huff did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
American Oversight’s executive director, Chioma Chukwu, said: “Susie Wiles may be publicly portrayed as the voice of reason in this White House, but behind the scenes, she played matchmaker, helping to connect fringe election deniers with senior officials.”
