Let's take a look at the continuing election-denial circus in Arizona. Two AZ Counties delay certification due to "Questions" about Maricopa. Failing to certify the vote by Dec 5th means none of their votes are counted. Both counties are Republican leaning 2nd Arizona county delays certifying election, for now A second Republican-controlled Arizona county on Monday delayed certifying the results of this month's election as a protest against voting issues in Maricopa County that some GOP officials have blamed for their losses in top races including the contest for governor. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...elays-certifying-election-for-now/ar-AA14nMZo What a genius plan these clowns have.
Messages obtained from Cyber Ninjas reveal they were trying to find and discredit votes cast by "illegals, out of state residents, and gays." Cyber Ninjas CEO’s Text Messages About Arizona ‘Audit’ Reveal Frequent Contacts with Election Deniers https://www.americanoversight.org/c...eveal-frequent-contacts-with-election-deniers The messages also highlight “audit” leaders’ interest in potentially discrediting certain votes. On June 12, Logan exchanged texts with a recipient named Seth, likely election fraud conspiracy theorist Seth Keshel. The message recipient asked if “after the count, the ballots are all checked for legality.” Logan said, “That is the point of the paper examination.” The recipient asked, “What about the illegals, out of state residents, gays voting?” Logan replied, “That part is indefinitely delayed… but hoping to kick that off soon.” It is unclear what process or stage of the “audit” they are referring to.
Arizona election denier's 'frivolous' bid to overturn midterm results is booted from court https://www.rawstory.com/mark-finchem-az-2658976353/
Welcome the new MAGA Arizona windbag... and she's just as insane as the previous ones. Make Way for Rachel Jones, the Next Gen of Windbag MAGA Acolytes in Arizona https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/new...s-is-a-domestic-threat-attorney-says-15320776 For MAGA practitioners in the Arizona State Legislature, it’s out with the old, in with the new. The sun may have set on the political contretemps of "Conspiracy Czar” Mark Finchem and "Windy” Wendy Rogers. But thanks to the November elections, they’ve been swiftly supplanted with new foot soldiers from the ranks of former President Donald Trump’s election-denying cesspool of political inexperience and ignorance. One new acolyte stands out in a crowded field. Meet State Representative Rachel Jones, who took office on January 9 and has urped out her fair share of alt-right bombast on Twitter. When she’s not agreeing with QAnon followers or stealing other people’s tweets and slapping her own watermark on them, she’s spouting lies — that Governor Katie Hobbs is a dictator, that newspapers work actively to obfuscate the truth, and that at least 42 percent of ballots in the recent election weren’t counted. Jones, a Tucson Republican, transitioned from stay-at-home mom to state lawmaker when she won one of two House seats in District 17, which includes portions of Pima and Pinal counties. Her campaign was bankrolled by a list of failed up-ticket Arizona Republicans including Blake Masters, Jim Lamon, and Elijah Norton.
Not surprising anyone... Revealed: Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/27/trump-secretly-donated-1m-arizona-election-audit One of the enduring mysteries surrounding the chaotic attempts to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential battle has been solved: who made a secret $1m donation to the controversial election “audit” in Arizona? The identity of one of the largest benefactors behind the discredited review of Arizona’s vote count has been shrouded in secrecy. Now the Guardian can reveal that the person who partially bankrolled the failed attempt to prove that the election was stolen from Trump was … Trump. An analysis by the watchdog group Documented has traced funding for the Arizona audit back to Trump’s Save America Pac. The group tracked the cash as it passed from Trump’s fund through an allied conservative group, and from there to a shell company which in turn handed the money to contractors and individuals involved in the Arizona audit. Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that led the Arizona audit, disclosed in 2021 that $5.7m of its budget came from several far-right groups invested in the “stop the steal” campaign to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory. It was later divulged that a further $1m had supported the audit from an account controlled by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican election lawyer who advised Trump as he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. But who gave the $1m to Mitchell? In September 2021, as Cyber Ninjas was preparing to deliver its findings, the New York Times reported that unnamed “officials” had denied that Trump had played any part in securing the funds. Republican leaders of the Arizona senate who asked Cyber Ninjas to carry out the audit also publicly denied that Trump was involved, saying “this absolutely has nothing to do with Trump”. Documented’s analysis pierces through that denial. Basing its research on corporate, tax and campaign finance filings, as well as emails and text messages obtained by the non-partisan accountability group American Oversight through public records requests, the watchdog has followed the money on its circuitous journey from the former US president’s Pac to the Arizona review. ‘Highly hypocritical’ Cyber Ninjas’ widely-lambasted inquiry was focused on Maricopa county, Arizona’s most populated area. Biden won the county by 45,109 votes. The purported investigation was suffused with wild conspiracy theories, including the claim that bamboo fibers found in ballot sheets proved they had been printed in Asia. The review was decried even by local Republicans as a “grift disguised as an audit”. Bill Gates, the Republican vice-chair of the Maricopa county board of supervisors at the time of the Cyber Ninjas audit, said he was “disappointed, but not surprised” by the Guardian’s revelation that Trump had helped to pay for it. “I have no problem with audits,” Gates said. “What I have a problem with is an audit that is undertaken with a goal in mind, and that is literally being funded by one of the candidates. This is absolutely what we do not want to happen.” Gates pointed out that under Arizona law, electoral candidates are not allowed to fund vote recounts which have to be financed with taxpayer dollars. Though the Cyber Ninjas review was technically not a recount, it served a similar purpose. “At the very least, it is highly hypocritical for the Arizona state senate to have allowed the audit to be funded in this fashion,” Gates said. The money trail exposed by Documented begins with Trump’s loosely regulated leadership Pac, Save America, which raised millions in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat on the back of the false election fraud narrative. In its final report released in December, the bipartisan January 6 committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol highlighted how Save America Pac gave $1m to the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). The committee did not say what the money was for, or where it ended up. Top CPI officials include Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, along with other senior Trump insiders after they left the White House. The organization is developing a political infrastructure to sustain the former president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. Documented’s research shows that discussions around a possible payment from Trump to the Arizona audit began in June 2021. Records obtained by American Oversight reveal that on 27 June, the retired Army colonel and arch election denier Phil Waldron texted the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, Doug Logan, saying: “Kurt is going to talk to 45 today about $$.” The “45” in the text is a reference to Trump – the 45th president of the US – and “Kurt” may have been a reference to the election-denying lawyer Kurt Olsen. Waldron added: “Mike L talking to Corey L” – alluding to Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow who is a devotee of Trump’s stolen election lie, and the former Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. On 16 July 2021, Waldron asked Logan if he had received “a 1mil [payment] from Corey Lewendowsk [sic]”. He went on: “Supposedly Kurt talked to trump and they got 1 mil for you,” but that “I couldn’t verify who sent and who received.” Logan responded that he had not yet received payment from Trump. Ten days later, on 26 July 2021, Trump’s Save America Pac made its $1m transfer to CPI, according to Federal Election Commission records. Two days after that, on 28 July, a new group called the American Voting Rights Foundation (AVRF) was registered as a corporation in Delaware. Tax filings obtained recently show that CPI in turn gave $1m to AVRF in 2021 – the only known donation that the group has ever received. The date of CPI’s donation to AVRF is not a matter of public record, but other details – including CPI’s relationship with AVRF, the timing and amounts of the known transfers, and the discussion among Trump allies about the former president’s plans to give $1m to the audit 10 days before Trump gave $1m to CPI – clearly indicate that it was the money that came from Trump’s PAC. Records obtained by American Oversight showed that AVRF was connected to Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who is now a senior fellow at CPI. She is best known for having taken part in the infamous phone call in January 2021 that is now being weighed by an Atlanta prosecutor, in which Trump tried to pressure Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes” needed for him to win. Documented has discovered that the ties between CPI and AVRF went even deeper. CPI entities effectively controlled AVRF. Tax records show that AVRF’s “direct controlling entity” is America First Legal, the CPI-launched project led by Trump’s former speechwriter Stephen Miller. Tax records also show that another CPI project, the Center for Renewing America, lists AVRF as one of its “related organizations”. The final stage in the money’s journey was from AVRF to Cyber Ninjas and the audit itself. The same day that AVRF was registered in Delaware – 28 July 2021 – Mitchell sent an email connecting the Cyber Ninjas CEO Logan, together with the spokesman of the audit Randy Pullen, to AVRF’s treasurer Tom Datwyler. The email, contained in the documents obtained by American Oversight, spelled out that money was about to be transferred from AVRF to Arizona contractors approved by Cyber Ninjas. The last step was recorded in an email sent the following day, 29 July, in which Mitchell itemized $1m split into three separate payments going to two entities supporting the audit and to individuals “working at the audit site”. CPI president Ed Corrigan is cc’ed on the email. The money had reached its destination, with no Trump fingerprints anywhere in sight. The Guardian has invited both Save America Pac and CPI to comment but they did not immediately respond. ‘Counter to transparency’ A final mystery remains: why would Trump and his inner circle go to such lengths to keep the former president’s bankrolling of the audit secret? One theory is that Trump might have been worried that the audit would look less credible should he be seen to be funding it. Another possible scenario is that he feared that the review might prove to be such a shambles that he wanted to keep his distance. On Thursday, the Arizona Republic reported further fresh evidence that despite the denials Trump was intimately involved in the audit. New records obtained by the newspaper show that Trump was being directly informed about the progress of the audit as it was being conducted. Newly released messages from the Cyber Ninjas chief Logan also show that he discussed the need for any Trump donation to be made in secret. “I told them there was no way I could take funds directly,” he said in a private digital chat. In the end, the Cyber Ninjas audit not only lacked credibility, it also spectacularly failed to meet its goal. In September 2021, the firm released the results of its investigation and found that Biden had indeed won Maricopa county by 360 more votes than the official count. No conclusive evidence of fraud was uncovered, and the claims raised by the audit were thoroughly debunked in a 93-page report. Cyber Ninjas went out of business in January 2022. Gates, the Maricopa county supervisor, said that a large portion of the $1m that ended up with the Arizona audit would have come from small donations to Trump’s Pac. “It’s sad that so many small donors had their money used for this effort, and Trump’s attempt to hide that was certainly counter to transparency.” (Article has additional graphics and information)
The Republicans in Arizona can't seem to move beyond their election fraud nonsense. Truly a set of demented clowns. Arizona GOP convention ‘devolved into chaos’ as members ‘hissed and screamed’ about voting machines https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...-about-voting-machines/ar-AA16OPzK?li=BBnbfcL Republicans in Maricopa County gathered for a meeting in a megachurch earlier this month to elect their leadership, only for the whole thing to devolve as attendees "hissed and screamed" and pushed conspiracy theories about the equipment being used in the process, reported Yvonne Wingett Sanchez for The Washington Post on Friday. "Just a few months ago, Arizona Republicans lost nearly every major statewide midterm race after campaigning for months on false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. That was not always a winning strategy in Arizona or in many other states, but many Republican leaders and their supporters here are still clinging to election-fraud falsehoods, refusing to acknowledge that their candidates lost and resisting attempts to lessen the extreme divisions in the state," said the report. "The recent Saturday gathering of the Maricopa County Republican Committee to pick new leadership could have been a day of reflection, but it instead showcased how conspiratorial claims of voter fraud remain a litmus test for leaders in the GOP’s state and local party apparatus." "The day was a preview of the fight to come this weekend when the state Republican Party convenes to select new leadership and priorities ahead of 2024. That meeting, set to unfold in the same megachurch, will test the power of new grass-roots activists versus a more tenured pragmatic faction focused less on litigating past elections and more on winning ones in 2024," said the report. "By the end of the night, when county activists had to leave the church’s inner sanctum, it was unclear who would lead the county party, a frustrating end for some so focused on having elections that begin and end on a single day." After a series of furious arguments, the party finally decided to quell the conspiracy theorists by counting the ballots multiple ways. The Maricopa GOP elected as its new chair Craig Berland, who was endorsed by losing pro-Trump gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and MyPillow CEO-turned-election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.
Newly released documents show what an obscene farce the "Arizona Audit" was. Arizona election 'audit' full of ineptitude, infighting and deceit, messages show https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...g-deceit-messages-show/11135716002/?gnt-cfr=1 Thousands of new documents The Arizona Republic obtained from Cyber Ninjas, the obscure company state Senate Republicans hired to conduct a partisan "audit" of the 2020 election, show the endeavor was fraught with conflict and confusion. The contractors confided they didn't know Arizona election law when they were hired, struggled to pay bills and raise money, fought over what to report to the Senate, got deeply sidetracked by a film about their effort, and consistently were in touch with people who tried to concoct ways to keep former President Trump in office after his election loss. Among the most revealing details in the new documents are that the lead contractor reached out to people close to Trump to ask for money to conduct the supposedly objective "audit," and others involved communicated with the former president as well. (More at above url)
The circus continues... Arizona GOP State Legislator and self-proclaimed "election fraud investigator" keeps her campaign promise to vote against all legislation until the 2022 Election is "redone" by voting against the passage of the GOP State Budget. A single Republican holdout doomed the GOP’s ‘skinny budget’ on Monday https://www.azmirror.com/blog/a-single-republican-holdout-doomed-the-gops-skinny-budget-on-monday/
It has become so funny...they should start charging a few dollars for admission to see the next circus trick.
Not surprising any rational person. Arizona’s top prosecutor concealed records debunking election fraud claims https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...s-debunking-election-fraud-claims/ar-AA17NZUJ