News Roundup: The Big Lie's Infiltration of State Governments - American Oversight

Docket Number 19-3435

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.

Litigation

Complaint: American Oversight v. Multiple Agencies — Calendars of Senior Officials

Nov 14, 2019

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

On the Records

Other Stories We’re Following

National News

In the States

The Coronavirus Pandemic

The Pandemic in Florida

The Jan. 6 Attack

Litigation

Complaint: American Oversight v. Multiple Agencies — Calendars of Senior Officials