Minnesota businessman Marty Davis met Trump, pushed Meadows to fight 2020 election loss

One of Minnesota's wealthiest businessmen, Marty Davis, played a previously undisclosed role in encouraging former President Donald Trump to fight the 2020 election results, according to reporting by the political news site Talking Points Memo.

Davis, a Shorewood-based member of the billionaire family that owns the countertop maker Cambria, exchanged text messages with Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and visited Trump in the White House briefly in December 2020, Talking Points Memo reported over the weekend.

In those messages and during the visit, Davis questioned the veracity of Minnesota's election results and encouraged Trump to investigate allegations of "ballot harvesting," or collections of absentee votes by political partisans.

Davis declined an interview request with the Star Tribune on Tuesday.

In comments to Talking Points Memo, Davis said he thought the White House should have pushed for hearings on ballot harvesting.

"I gave information or input to what I thought they needed to do to investigate it," he told Talking Points Memo. He also described his visit to the White House in mid-December 2020 as "a courtesy call."

Davis has made dozens of donations to Republican candidates and PACs in recent years, FEC records show. He has also worked with Democrats, including support for the Clinton Foundation.

He hosted a fundraiser attended by Trump at his home a month before the 2020 election. Trump staged a rally just a few days before the 2016 election at the hangar of Sun Country Airlines, which the Davis family owned at the time, at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Davis lobbied the Trump administration for tariffs on China-produced quartz that would help Cambria's price competitiveness. The company in 2018 filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission that China was illegally dumping underpriced quartz in the U.S.

The Commerce Department ruled in Cambria's favor and implemented tariffs up to 500% on quartz from China. The Biden administration has left those tariffs in place. U.S. makers of quartz more recently have pressed for investigations of dumping by producers in India.

Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection found Chinese firms were trying to circumvent the tariffs by sending quartz through Malaysia labeled as "crushed glass."

Davis told the Star Tribune last month that Cambria would not have made the recent expansion of its Le Sueur factory if not for the restrictions on Chinese quartz.

Talking Points Memo, which obtained thousands of text messages that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, portrayed Davis as someone who "seems to have gone further" than other businesspeople in the weeks after the 2020 election.

In one text to Meadows, Davis noted several Trump associates have been "trying to pin down an oval for me with POTUS," referring to a prospective Oval Office meeting with Trump.

"I want to thank him and tell him what Im [sic] doing to fight now for him!" Davis wrote. "Also, heavily support 2024 if he gets screwed on this thing."

He then invited Meadows to go on a hunting trip to either Canada or South Dakota.

Unlike another Minnesota businessman who denied the outcome of the 2020 election — Mike Lindell, owner of Chanhassen-based MyPillow — Davis rejected to Trump and Meadows the idea that voting machines by Dominion Voting Systems affected the Minnesota vote, according to Talking Points Memo. Lindell and MyPillow are being sued by Dominion and another voting machines firm for defamation.

"We had very few Dominium [sic] machines in Minnesota! Point was not machines in Minnesota!" Davis wrote in one text to Meadows. "Cheating was by multiple and egregious ballot creation."

There has been never been any credible evidence of voter fraud in Minnesota.