Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorists Take Over State Republican Parties

Vice News has one of those “no duh” stories to report. Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorists Are Taking Over State Republican Parties (excerpts):

The Republican Party chairs of Texas and Wyoming have flirted with secession from the United States. Oklahoma’s Republican chair has called Islam a “cancer.” The Oregon GOP called the Capitol insurrection a “false flag” operation. And at least 19 Republican state chairs—including most of the ones in key swing states—publicly pushed former President Trump’s big lie about the election.

A VICE News review of public positions of all 50 GOP state chairs shows a significant number are openly pushing conspiracy theories, spouting unhinged rhetoric, and actively undermining voters’ trust in democracy. That includes the chairs of nearly every swing state in the U.S. And the trend is accelerating: Many of the most extreme chairs just won their chairmanships or have been reelected since Trump left office four months ago, a number of them with his explicit endorsement.

[T]he overwhelming wins by Trump loyalists in the first widespread internal Republican elections since Trump left office, albeit in small contests chosen by a hardcore, activist subset of the GOP base, show that his conspiratorial claims about the election run even deeper in the states than in Washington—and will guide the grassroots for years to come.

[T]he most common and pernicious conspiracy pushed by state party chairs is the one that’s come to define the Republican Party: the big lie that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump and marred by widespread voting fraud. A significant plurality have publicly undermined voters’ trust in their elections, and those chairs who aren’t explicitly repeating his lies have pointedly refused to dispute them, while pushing “election integrity” measures to make it harder to vote.

They’ve supported moves to censure their own members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump, a ceremonial shaming that’s taken place from Alaska to Louisiana to North Carolina to Ohio to Wyoming. And while a handful of chairs sought to push back against the party’s drift further into conspiracy-mongering, others are pushing hard in the opposite direction, using their chairmanships to promote unhinged conspiracy theories.

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The best-known of the bunch is Arizona Republican chair Kelli Ward, who seized control of the state GOP in 2019 after losing a 2016 primary challenge to then-Sen. John McCain (his team nicknamed her “Chemtrail Kelli” because she’d convened a hearing where people pushed conspiracy theories about chemtrails). Under Ward, the Arizona Republican Party has grown increasingly conspiratorial.

Ward spoke at multiple Stop the Steal rallies in Arizona about the “stolen” election—and filed an unsuccessful court challenge to nullify Arizona’s election that claimed “massive voter fraud’ had occurred. The judge tossed it out because the case was based on “gossip and innuendo” and “sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence.”

But that didn’t stop her. She called Biden’s win a “coup” on Dec. 20, and called on Trump to “cross the rubicon” to stop it, a reference to Julius Caesar’s historic decision to overthrow the Roman Republic. When Stop the Steal leader Ali Alexander tweeted in early December that he was “willing to give my life in this fight,” the Arizona Republican Party retweeted it, asking: “He is. Are you?”

Trump endorsed Ward for another term, and she narrowly won in late January, in an election marred by claims of vote rigging (no irony there). The same day, the state party censured sitting Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain. Ward has since vocally supported the incompetent partisan audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots.

The cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs “Chemtrail Kelli” Ward is back at it again this week after the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and County Recorder destroyed the Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit” and made them all look like the ridiculous fools they are.

Ward is not deterred by looking like a ridiculous fool – that is her brand. Arizona Republican Party chair is threatening to have election officials ARRESTED if they refuse to comply with the audit they have called a ‘sham’ run by ‘grifters’:

The head of the Arizona Republican Party said state officials who don’t comply with the GOP-mandated audit of election results in Maricopa County should be arrested.

Appearing on One America News, the far-right news network whose anchors helped raise money to pay for the audit, Kelli Ward suggested the arrest if officials don’t comply.

‘There have to be consequences,’ Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, said. ‘There could be arrests of people who are refusing to comply.’

Just to be clear, inciting an insurrection (see above) is a felony for which “Chemtrail Kelli” could be arrested. 18 U.S. Code § 2383. There should be consequences for her traitorous incitement. Dominion Voting Systems is still contemplating suing her for defamation as well. Kelli Ward Gets Cease-and-Desist Letter Over Election Tech Fraud Claims. There has to be consequences for her repeated unhinged lies as well.

It’s the latest drama to encompass the audit of the 2.1 million ballots in the state’s largest county, which has featured false allegations votes were destroyed and conspiracy theories alleging the ballots were shredded and eaten by chickens, who were then killed to cover up the evidence.

Ward’s comments came after the Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors for Maricopa County refused to attend a meeting Tuesday with GOP senators who had demanded the audit. The board called the audit was a ‘sham’ run by ‘grifters’ that cast doubts upon the democratic process.

And it wasn’t the first time an arrest has been suggested.

In February, when the county was arguing against the audit in court, most Arizona Republican senators supported a resolution to hold the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in contempt and arrest supervisors for failing to turn over access to voting records. The resolution failed to pass but showed the mindset of those elected officials who demanded the audit.

At Tuesday’s meeting, one of the firms hired to run the audit changed his tune and said no data or ballots were destroyed after originally claiming local officials eliminated evidence.

The contractor admitted they had been looking in the wrong place for the voter data, a reversal that could prove an embarrassment to the Republican state senators who ordered the audit.

Donald Trump had picked up the false claim and amplified it, leading Maricopa County officials to write, in a scathing letter to state Senate president Karen Fann, that the auditors couldn’t find the data because they didn’t know where to look.

The GOP senators met with auditors Tuesday night to get an update on their work, particularly the allegation of destroyed data.

But Ben Cotton, founder of a computer forensics firm CyFIR LLC and one of the contractors working on the audit, told them he now has all the voter information regarding the 2.1 million votes cast in 2020 presidential race.

‘All of this may be a moot point because subsequently, I have been able to recover all of those deleted files and I have access to that data,’ he said.  ‘I have the information I need from the county.’

The data had been found on a set of four computer drives.

‘Well that’s good news,’ said State Senator Warren Petersen, the Republican chairman of the state Senate Judiciary Committee, one of the two GOP lawmakers doing the questioning during the hour-long meeting.

Maricopa County’s Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors, who have blasted the audit as a ‘sham’ run by ‘grifters’, snapped back at the admissions.

‘Just want to underscore that AZ Senate’s @ArizonaAudit account accused Maricopa County of deleting files – which would be a crime – then a day after our technical letter explained they were just looking in the wrong place – all of a sudden ‘auditors’ have recovered the files,’ the board said on its official Twitter account.

Members of the county board boycotted Tuesday’s meeting as part of their objections to the recount, which they said is unnecessary and undermining public confidence in elections.

The meeting was broadcast online but was not open to the press or public. It was attended by Fann and Peterson, the two Republican state senators, who asked friendly questions of the three witnesses: Cotton, Cyber Ninjas founder Doug Logan and Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state serving as the Senate’s audit liaison.

Because it was a meeting and not a hearing, Fann and Petersen were able to keep out Democratic lawmakers, who likely would have asked tougher questions.

State Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios, a Democrat of Phoenix, told local reporters she tried to attend but Fann wouldn’t let her.

‘This is still a one-sided, partisan witch hunt that has no basis in reality,’ she said of the audit.

The state Senate hired Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm, to run the audit. But questions have been raised about the procedures its using to examine the ballots and about Logan, who has expressed statements of support to Trump’s false claim the election was stolen from him.

It’s also unclear how much the audit will cost or who is paying for all of it. The Arizona Senate agreed to pay Cyber Ninjas $150,000 from tax payer funds, but Logan has said that’s not enough to cover the costs.

He hasn’t said where the rest of the money is coming from.

At least two fundraisers, one organized by a One American News, a pro-Trump cable network, and the other by a prominent Trump donor, claimed to have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.

Concerns about the allegedly missing ballots went viral when the Twitter account for the Senate’s audit wrote: ‘Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit. This is spoliation of evidence!’

Trump ran with the claim, saying in a statement on Saturday: ‘The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the Forensic Audit, is up in arms.’

The allegation appears to have been a breaking point for the Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, which has publicly and vehemently blasted the audit.

The board learned about the claim when it went viral on Twitter.

In at letter sent to Fann on Monday, they said it was false and demanded a retraction.

‘We demand that you immediately rescind your false and malicious tweet asserting that Maricopa County ‘spoiled evidence’ in the days before we provided the server to the Senate,’ they wrote.

Fann, meanwhile, said she’s not looking to overturn the election results but wants to improve future procedures.

That has caused concern about Democrats, who worry the Republicans will try to pass laws that make voting more difficult, as other states have done.

‘I have said from the get go I am relatively sure weren’t going to find anything of any magnitude that would imply that any intentional wrongdoing was going on,’ Fann said at Tuesday’s hearing. ‘I believe that we were going to find what we’ve known all along and some of the things is we could do a better job.’

Tuesday’s meeting was held after the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors slammed the ‘sham’ recount of the 2020 presidential results, calling it ‘political theater’ backed by ‘grifters and con-artists.’

The members of the board didn’t hold back when it came to expressing their disgust for the audit.

It has become subject to numerous conspiracy theories including one that state elections officials shredded ballots, fed them to chickens, and then had the chickens incinerated to cover up the evidence.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican official who is in charge of maintaining files on the country’s 2.6 million registered voters, blasted that claim.

‘I mean, that chickens[hit] one is probably pretty top of the charts,’ he told CNN.

In a public meeting on Monday night and in their letter to Fann, the Maricopa county board criticized the audit as a ‘spectacle’ that is causing Arizona to be a ‘laughing stock’ and encouraging people to distrust elections.

The county board of supervisors called out ‘the big lie,’ referring to the false claim the election was stolen from Trump. There has been no evidence of wide spread voter fraud in the presidential contest and multiple recount have confirmed Biden’s victory.

‘It is time to make a choice to defend the Constitution and the Republic,’ they wrote in the letter.

‘We stand united together to defend the Constitution and the Republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for the truth.’

‘You have rented out the once good name of the Arizona State Senate to grifters and con-artists,’ they claimed.

In a show of unity Richer also signed on to the letter, as did the county’s Democratic sheriff.

‘We express our united view that your ‘audit’, no matter what your intentions were in the beginning, has become a spectacle that is harming all of us. Our state has become a laughingstock. Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic,’ they wrote.

Richer told CNN the officials sent the letter to Fann because they’re exhausted.

‘It is exhausting having to respond to every insinuation when we’re trying to do the normal work of the county. I have no idea how long this will go on for. It will possibly go into 2022,’ he said.

‘Just stop indulging this. Stop giving space for lies,’ he noted.

Trump has touted the audit repeatedly and his allies are pouring money into the state but the Justice Department warned it could be in violation of federal voting and civil rights laws.

Multiple Republicans in the Arizona have criticized the audit, saying the election was fairly conducted and the results – Joe Biden beat Trump by 10,457 votes, or 0.3 percent of the nearly 3.4 million ballots cast – are accurate.

Two previous recounts of the ballots in Maricopa County, where Biden won by more than two points, found the results had been accurate.

The audit has no formal authority and will not change the election results in Arizona.

The board of supervisors, made up of four Republicans and one Democrat, declined to meet with Fann about issues she claimed the Cyber Ninjas found with the ballots.

‘I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process. Finish your audit and be ready to defend what you’re finding in a court of law,’ Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican, said at Monday’s public meeting.

‘This board is done explaining anything,’ he noted. ‘People’s ballots and money are not make-believe. It’s time to be done with this craziness, and get on with this county’s critical business.’

Cyber Ninjas has been conducting a slow hand recount of the ballots on the floor of the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. They’ve also been examining them, with a microscope and UV light. One contractor said the workers are conducting a ‘forensic’ analysis of the ballots to determine if the paper is made of bamboo as part of their look into whether or not China interfered with the election.

The board of supervisors have decried their methods.

‘You have rented out the once good name of the Arizona State Senate to grifters and con-artists, who are fundraising hard-earned money from our fellow citizens even as your contractors parade around the Coliseum, hunting for bamboo,’ the officials wrote in their letter.

County officials, Richter said, have reached their limits.

‘It was one thing with the audit when they were looking at UV lights and looking for bamboo fibers in the paper,’ he told CNN. ‘But when they just accused us too many times of breaking the law, they defamed our good employees too many times, they’ve defamed the hard-working people here. We’re all humans, and we have our limits!’

The contractors have counted about 500,000 ballots so far. They were forced to pause while high school graduation ceremonies took place in the coliseum. The ballots were packed up and placed in storage. Counting is expected to resume next week.

By way of comparison, the state of Georgia conducted a professionally managed and legitimate statewide Risk Limiting Audit that was a full manual tally of all votes cast, over 5 million ballots, in just six days.

This is your first clue that what these Cyber Ninja clowns are doing is not a legitimate, professionally managed hand count audit of only one county.