News Roundup: The Big Lie’s Infiltration of State Governments

This week, three and a half months after American Oversight first sued for transparency in the Arizona Senate’s bogus election “audit,” the Senate finally released tens of thousands of pages of records on its court-ordered deadline of Aug. 31. 

The final report on the contractors’ findings is still weeks away, according to the Senate’s attorney, with the most recent delay coming after members of the Cyber Ninjas team became sick with Covid-19. The records released on Tuesday provide yet more evidence of the depths of partisanship and political bias that permeated the process from the beginning — and add some new names to the list of outside parties in touch with the officials running the operation. (More details below.) 

But while American Oversight has been reviewing the more than 80,000 pages that were released, the Senate withheld nearly 3,000 additional documents, citing legislative privilege for a great many of them. 

• The Senate provided a log listing records that had been withheld; among those the Senate claims are protected by that privilege are texts between Senate President Karen Fann and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and others. 
• But the log also revealed that Fann had texted about the investigation and vendors with U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, a vocal proponent of the Big Lie who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol attack. 
• Other frequent contacts include Arizona Republican Liz Harris, who has been organizing problematic direct-canvassing operations in which volunteers ask residents about their votes. 

Election-denying conspiracists are hardly on the fringe — as ProPublica reports, thousands of supporters of the former president’s stolen-election lie are “tak[ing] over the Republican Party at the local level, exerting more partisan influence on how elections are run.” They also include elected officials in states across the country. 

• In Pennsylvania, state Senate leader Jake Corman has embraced an election-undermining investigation first initiated by “Stop the Steal” supporter state Sen. Doug Mastriano. And this week, Pennsylvania Spotlight reported on an email in which a state representative sent county commissioners a list of deceased voters who had cast ballots — only they weren’t dead. 
• In Wisconsin, a Republican-led committee approved the hiring of former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to lead Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s bogus investigation of the 2020 election. The investigation is authorized to spend up to $680,000 in taxpayer money, including $325,000 for a data analysis contractor. 

This infiltration of the Big Lie becomes even more concerning when considering the enormous power that state governments wield.  

• “Increasingly, state legislatures, especially in 30 Republican-controlled states, have seized an outsize role for themselves,” wrote the New York Times‘ Michael Wines this week, “pressing conservative agendas on voting, Covid-19 and the culture wars that are amplifying partisan splits and shaping policy well beyond their own borders.” 
• As Wines notes, one salient example is the voting-restriction bill that passed in the Texas Legislature this week. Among other measures, the legislation bans local initiatives used by Houston’s Harris County that made it easier to vote — and which were disproportionately used by voters of color. 
• With the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal this week to block Texas’s law banning abortions after six weeks, many of those states are looking to replicate the extreme ban with laws of their own.

On the Records 

Arizona Senate ‘Audit’ Documents
American Oversight has been reviewing the records released on Tuesday — there are a lot of them! — and have posted them here. Check our website Friday afternoon for an update on our findings, and read here in detail about what we’ve already seen. A summary: 

• The records further confirm the partisan nature of the “audit,” as well as top officials’ deference to election conspiracists. For example, there are multiple instances of communications with election denier and anti-vaccine activist Shiva Ayyadurai, including what appears to be a signed contract between him and Cyber Ninjas. 
• Spokesman Randy Pullen exchanged texts with former Trump appointee Jeff DeWit, who the texts suggest was acting as a messenger for the former president. 
• There’s also yet more evidence that top officials were aware of the problematic direct canvassing that has been going on, even if those potentially voter-intimidating operations were not officially sanctioned by the Senate. 
• New details about audit costs show how quickly the operation blew past the initial $150,000 the Senate had authorized. An invoice from the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix alone totals nearly $130,000. 
• Election deniers in other states have taken cues from the Arizona review. The records indicate that officials were in touch with Wisconsin’s Gableman, and there are other communications with activists looking to replicate the effort elsewhere. 

The Trump Administration’s Casual Corruption
We obtained emails showing that the former Trump-appointed ambassador to Canada, Kelly Craft, directed government business to the Trump International Hotel in D.C. “Is this a meeting I should attend?” Craft wrote in one email to a staffer. “If so, I would prefer the TRUMP HOTEL.” Read more in Forbes, which reported on the emails, as did the Washington Post. 

Other Stories We’re Following 

National News 

• Supreme Court refuses to block Texas law banning abortions at six weeks (Washington Post) 
• The Sackler family has won immunity from all future opioid lawsuits (NPR) 
• Federal judge throws out Trump administration rule allowing the draining and filling of streams, marshes and wetlands (Washington Post) 
• Only 2 governors are so far refusing to take in Afghan refugees (HuffPost) 
• Immigrants pay cripplingly high bail bonds to be released from detention across U.S. (Guardian) 
• Corporate America launches massive lobbying blitz to kill key parts of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion economic plan (Washington Post) 

 In the States 

• Lawsuit claims Montana secretary of state’s office knowingly profited $120k off duplicate charges (NBC Montana) 
• FBI examining $100M tax refund push by Arizona Gov. Ducey staffers (Arizona Republic) 
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton cleared by his own office of wrongdoing in bribery allegations (Texas Tribune) 
• Colorado secretary of state sues to stop Mesa County clerk from overseeing elections (Denver Post) 
• Arizona Supreme Court will be first state to end peremptory challenges to potential jurors (Arizona Republic) 
• Michigan Republicans announce voting restrictions ballot measure as end-run around Whitmer (Michigan Advance) 
• Slammed by staff shortages and ‘desperation,’ some north Florida prisons to shutter (Miami Herald) 
• Private donations for a Texas border wall have soared to $54 million. But it’s still unclear who’s giving. (Texas Tribune) 
• Police ‘target list’ of protesters shared among law enforcement agencies (Wisconsin Examiner) 

The Coronavirus Pandemic 

• Massive randomized study is proof that surgical masks limit coronavirus spread, authors say (Washington Post) 
• Vaccines cut risk of ‘long Covid’ in half, major study finds (Washington Post) 
• Religious exemptions from coronavirus vaccine are expected to become a legal battleground (Washington Post) 
• WHO monitoring new coronavirus variant named Mu (Guardian) 
• Tens of billions of dollars in pandemic aid for hospitals and nursing homes sits unused (Washington Post) 
• Two senior FDA vaccine leaders step down as agency faces decision on boosters (CNN) 
• More states embrace vax passports without waiting for Biden (Politico) 
• Biden administration opens civil rights investigation over bans on school mask mandates (Washington Post) 

The Pandemic in Florida 

• Florida changed its Covid-19 data, creating an ‘artificial decline’ in recent deaths (Miami Herald) 
• Doctor who promoted ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment has advised Florida’s governor (Miami Herald) 
• Florida judge rules DeSantis administration cannot restrict school districts’ mask mandates (Washington Post) 
• Amid pandemic resurgence, Florida’s surgeon general is preparing to leave his post (Miami Herald) 

The Jan. 6 Attack 

• Intel shows extremists to attend Capitol rally (Associated Press) 
• McCarthy warns telecom and social media companies that comply with January 6 committee records requests (CNN) 
• Capitol riot defendants’ lawyer apparently hospitalized with Covid leaves clients without counsel, prosecutors say (Washington Post) 
• Jan. 6 House investigators digging into Trump’s attempt to pressure Michigan GOPers into stealing election (Talking Points Memo) 
• Eight months after the Capitol riots, thousands of hours of surveillance footage remains secret (BuzzFeed News)