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'A blood bath': Reporter describes 'massive' division among Arizona Republicans over bogus election audit
May 17, 2021
In Arizona, Republicans are still promoting election lies with a blatantly partisan audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County — and former President Donald Trump and his supporters are claiming that the audit is showing that he really won the southwestern state. But CNN's John King, in a May 17 broadcast, called out those claims for what they are — an outright "lie" — and brought on an Arizona Republic reporter to discuss the audit's lack of transparency.
King explained, "The former president says what they are finding is shocking. The entire database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been deleted, Trump alleges. Ballots are missing and worse, he goes on to say. There's only one problem with that, and it is a recurring one: Trump is lying."
King added that the Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, is fed up with the farce of an audit and tweeted, "This is unhinged. I'm literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now. We can't indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country."
The CNN host then brought on Ryan Randazzo, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, to discuss the audit — which is being conducted by a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas.
King asked Randazzo if there is any "transparency" to the audit, and Randazzo — speaking from Phoenix — responded, "Not very much. We had to fight just to be in the room in the 19th row to watch what's going on with binoculars. But we don't know who's paying for it; so, we don't know, you know, if there are connections to the (former) president there. We don't even know who's running the Twitter account…. No, I wouldn't say there's a lot of transparency."
Randazzo noted that the audit was ordered by Republicans in the Arizona State Senate.
"They hired people who believe in conspiracy theories about the election to run this show, and they in turn hired people who believe in conspiracy theories to count the ballots," Randazzo told King.
King noted that there is a "divide in the Republican Party" about Trump's election fraud claims, which Richer has called out as bad for the GOP. And the CNN host asked Randazzo "how big" the "schism" within the Arizona Republican Party is over Trump's claims.
Randazzo replied, "It's massive. I mean, the election was run by the county supervisors, four or five of which are Republicans — and they're kind of sick of, you know, having the finger pointed at them that they oversaw something that was fraudulent when they know it wasn't. It's kind of a blood bath in the Republican Party here with people who are standing with the president, people who are standing up against those statements — and then some in the Republican Party, like the governor, who really are just trying to avoid it."
CNN Arizona www.youtube.com
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Rudy Giuliani claims evidence should be inadmissible because he's a 'distinguished lawyer' with a 'well-known client'
May 17, 2021
Investigators in Rudy Giuliani's case explained that the reason they sought a warrant for Giuliani's iCloud account was out of fear that he would destroy evidence or tamper with witnesses.
Giuliani, who's known to change phones frequently, left a voicemail in Dec. 2020 for Lev Parnas' lawyer, noting that he was getting rid of another phone. It didn't matter, the FBI already had the information from the year before.
"Mr. Giuliani's entreaty to speak with Mr. Parnas went unanswered, and it is unknown whether Mr. Giuliani actually altered or destroyed any evidence associated with his cell phone, nor why he might have felt a need to get 'rid of' his number," said Parnas's attorney, Joseph Bondy in a statement at the time.
An April NYPost report wondered if that call was a tip to investigators that Giuliani had burner phones.
New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi revealed that while meeting Giuliani for Bloody Marys, she saw, "in one hand, he clutched three phones of varying sizes. Two of the devices were unlocked, their screens revealing open tabs and a barrage of banner notifications as they knocked into each other and reacted to Giuliani's grip."
"Do you have all three phones?" Giuliani's bodyguard asked at one point in the report.
"Yeah, I got all three phones," he replied. "I gotta get down to two. I'm gonna try that tonight."
Nuzzi then realized that Giuliani had left one of the phones in the seat next to her, handing it to the bodyguard.
Giuliani's lawyers argued in a 17-page document that given he's such a "distinguished lawyer" with a "well-known client — the former president of the United States," he should be treated better. It's unclear how Giuliani's clients could determine what is or isn't admissible in court. There's also a question of whether or not Guiliani is actually Trump's lawyer as it was reported Trump was refusing to pay Giuliani for the impeachment trial, the Washington Post reported in January.
Two White House officials confirmed at the time that Trump "demanded that he personally approve any reimbursements for the expenses Giuliani incurred while traveling on the president's behalf to challenge election results in key states. They said Trump has privately expressed concern with some of Giuliani's moves and did not appreciate a demand from Giuliani for $20,000 a day in fees for his work attempting to overturn the election."
Trump is also currently refusing to help with Giuliani's legal fees fighting this case. As former New York prosecutor Preet Bharara explained, Trump "doesn't pay his own lawyers' fees," much less anyone else's.
Giuliani was triggered by the idea that he would destroy evidence. His lawyer, Robert Costello argued, "It is not only false, but extremely damaging to Giuliani's reputation. It is not supported by any credible facts and is contradicted by Giuliani's efforts to provide information to the government."
Except for previous reports about Giuliani swapping out phones.
Giuliani is under investigation for alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. There's also a possibility he also violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and campaign finance laws for work that he did in Ukraine trying to craft a story to attack then-Vice President Joe Biden.
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No, the media can't 'move on' from Trump's Big Lie — not until Republicans end their war on voting
May 17, 2021
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw was pretty angry with NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday's episode of "Meet the Press." Todd was uncharacteristically determined to hold the Republican's feet to the fire, calling him out for his support of Donald Trump's Big Lie.
"Why should anybody believe a word you say if the Republican Party itself doesn't have credibility?" the host asked. When Crenshaw, clearly annoyed at being called out for his B.S., retreated by whining that "the press is largely liberal," Todd was rightly contemptuous, retorting, "There's nothing lazier than that excuse!"
At stake: Crenshaw's support for Trump's false claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, claims that Trump used to justify an attempted coup and to incite an insurrection on January 6. Crenshaw's main role in all of that, as Todd pointed out, was joining a lawsuit filed by Texas' Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton which leveraged false accusations of "fraud" in a failed attempt to get the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the election. During the interview, Crenshaw hid behind a line that is increasingly popular among Republicans who are trying to wave off questions about their support for Trump's attempted coup: "[I]t's time to move on."
Republicans are increasingly circling around this talking point. They insist that the coup is ancient history and that it's churlish to keep rehashing who did and did not join in efforts to overturn democracy. It's the favored justification for the ouster of Wyoming's Rep. Liz Cheney from House GOP leadership, with Republicans claiming it's not that she refuses to support Trump's election lies so much as that she just keeps going on about it. And it was the line that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., trotted out last week, while trying to wave off media inquiries about the GOP's increasingly fierce backing of Trump's Big Lie: "I don't think anyone is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with, we're sitting here with the President today."
The problem with this "water under the bridge" approach is twofold. First, it should be self-evident that seditious behavior should not be so easily forgotten or forgiven. Second, Republicans themselves have not moved on from the attempted insurrection or the lies that Trump used to justify it. On the contrary, Republican leaders have spent the past four months actively moving not just to turn Trump's Big Lie into GOP canon but to use it to justify laying the groundwork for Trump or some other GOP nominee to successfully steal the 2024 election.
"[I]f the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there's no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect," Erica Newland of Protect Democracy recently told Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times. As Goldberg goes on to detail, since the insurrection, Republicans "have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election" — and not just with voter suppression laws, either.
Republican officials or politicians who stood against Trump's efforts to steal the election are being driven out of office and new laws are being passed to allow GOP-controlled state legislatures to invalidate the results of any election that a Democrat wins. Republicans are also passing harsh "electoral integrity" laws that are actually more about using threats of prosecution to intimidate election officials into looking the other way from GOP efforts to steal elections. And, as Goldberg writes, they are clearly lining up to justify it when a GOP-controlled House simply refuses to certify a Democratic winner of the 2024 election.
As Matt Gertz at Media Matters documented last week, the propaganda apparatus for the GOP — especially Fox News — has "responded to Donald Trump's 2020 defeat by institutionalizing his lie that the election was stolen and laying the groundwork to rig the next presidential election in favor of the GOP." Gertz writes:
Fox's propagandists are getting ready. They are cheering on the GOP's purges of officials insufficiently committed to authoritarian rule in the U.S. They are validating and valorizing the Capitol insurrectionists as patriots simply "there to support the president of the United States and defend our republic" rather than a collection of extremists. They are falsely claiming that Democratic pro-democracy legislation before Congress would "destroy the credibility of all future elections," while defending Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in the states.
In a piece at The Bulwark last month, Jonathan Last laid out how the GOP has been busy "removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply [with the coup] last time" and plotting out "how a Republican can win the presidency even while losing the popular vote and the Electoral College," i.e. how to steal the next election. Mona Charen, part of the small and shrinking group of Republicans who still believe in democracy, warned in another piece at The Bulwark last week that "the 2024 mantra" of the GOP "is going to be 'Steal It Back.'"
I got a taste this weekend when I tweeted out Goldberg's piece. I got a vicious reaction, as one conservative tweeter after another retorted by with variations of the argument that they are entitled to steal the 2024 election as revenge for Biden stealing the 2020 election. Of course, this is a lie — Biden won fair and square — but it was a small indicator of how "steal it back" is, indeed, becoming the Republican mantra.
This has all happening a mere four months into Biden's presidency. Republicans still have three and a half more years to keep building the political will and infrastructure necessary to steal the election in 2024, and clearly have every intention of doing so.
Democrats, meanwhile, seem wholly unable to take measures to slow down the coup train, between letting the filibuster kill any hope of passing bills to prevent these Republican manuevers and Biden's unwillingness to unleash the Justice Department to hold Trump accountable for his many crimes, which would take Trump out of the equation in 2024. The only real obstacle to the GOP successfully stealing the 2024 election is the mainstream media continuing to call out Trump's Big Lie and those Republicans who continue to support it. The public's refusal to be complacent is the main reason Trump failed to steal the 2020 election, and if there's any hope of stopping Republicans from pulling it off in 2024, the public must stay alert and ready to fight for their democracy. That's why Republicans are trying to bully journalists into shutting up about the insurrection already.
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