An informed public,
a strengthened democracy.
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.
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.
This infiltration of the Big Lie becomes even more concerning when considering the enormous power that state governments wield.
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 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.
Part of Investigation: