Trump’s MAGA Red Cap Thugs Are Making Death Threats To Secretary of State Katie Hobbs

by

Donald Trump’s MAGA red caps, his version of Italian “black shirts” and German “brown shirts” fascist militias, stormed the nation’s Capitol on January 6 in a violent seditious insurrection, a coup d’etat that failed to overthrow American democracy and replace it with GQP authoritarianism under the most corrupt and criminal president in American history, Donald Trump, as their “Dear Leader.”

Trump’s domestic terrorists are not done with their criminality. They are now making death threats to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs over the Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit” of Maricopa County ballots. Arizona’s Secretary Of State Targeted By Death Threats Amid Conspiracy-Fueled Ballot Recount:

Advertisement

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said she’s been the target of multiple death threats amid the ongoing review and recount of 2020 election ballots in her state — a Republican-led effort whose legitimacy has been questioned by Hobbs and other election officials.

Hobbs, a Democrat and the state’s top election official, said Thursday that a man had called her office “saying I deserve to die and wanting to know ‘what she is wearing so she’ll be easy to get.’” Hobbs said that “it was one of at least three such threats today.”

he secretary of state added that she and a staffer were later “chased” outside their office by a man she didn’t know.

It appears that the man who chased Hobbs was Jordan Conradson, who identifies himself as a reporter for Gateway Pundit, a far-right website known for spreading hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Conradson uploaded a video to Twitter on Thursday showing him following Hobbs and another woman as they walked quickly toward the entrance of a building. He yelled at Hobbs: “Why are you working so hard to shut the audit down? What are you hiding?”

In reaction to the recent threats and harassment, Hobbs said on Twitter: “The @ArizonaAudit and its far-right allies know their rhetoric will lead to this. They are complicit.”

KNXV-TV reported Friday that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) had assigned protection provided by the Arizona Department of Public Safety to Hobbs and her family because of the recent threats.

Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos adds, Arizona governor orders security protection for secretary of state and family after death threats:

The frightening and bizarre saga of Arizona’s sham election audit entered an even bleaker phase Friday with news that Gov. Doug Ducey had ordered state troopers to provide round-the-clock protection to the secretary of state after she and her family received multiple death threats.

The office of Secretary Katie Hobbs reportedly reached out to Ducey’s office requesting a security detail after Hobbs said she had received three separate death threats on Thursday.

On Twitter, Hobbs wrote, “Earlier today a man called my office saying I deserve to die and wanting to know ‘what she is wearing so she’ll be easy to get.’ … It was one of at least three such threats today. Then a man who I’ve never seen before chased me and my staffer outside of our office.”

Hobbs has become a target for fearlessly and repeatedly challenging the integrity of the sham audit being conducted of the Maricopa County election results, which helped secureJoe Biden’s victory in the state.

[T]his isn’t Hobbs’ first go-round with death threats related to the 2020 election. Hobbs also needed law enforcement protection in the weeks following the election last fall as the state became ground-zero for pro-Trump activists who refused to believe Donald Trump had lost the election. Death threats are apparently their strategy of choice.

It’s been almost six months since Ducey certified his state’s election results, which put Democrat Joe Biden ahead of then-President Donald Trump by 10,457 votes. Biden edged out Trump by more than 2 percentage points ― or about 45,000 votes ― in Maricopa County.

Since then, multiple election audits have been conducted in Maricopa County, which is home to most of Arizona’s voters ― but none of the audits has revealed any fraud or other irregularities.

This, however, hasn’t deterred the Republican-led state Senate from forging ahead with yet another review and hand recount of all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county. The outcome of the recount, which is expected to take months, will not change Arizona’s election results, Hobbs’s office has said.

Election officials have expressed concerns about the audit, which is being led by Cyber Ninjas, a private cybersecurity firm based in Florida. The company’s founder, Doug Logan, has come under scrutiny for his earlier promotion of election conspiracy theories. In a now-deleted tweet from December, for example, Logan said Trump “got 200k more votes than previously reported in Arizona.”

Hobbs has been one of the most vocal opponents of the audit, which she’s lambasted as a “farce.” In a blistering Wednesday letter to Ken Bennett, who is serving as the liaison between auditors and the Arizona Senate, Hobbs said she had “several” concerns regarding the ongoing recount, including red flags concerning Cyber Ninjas and its processes.

The audit procedures are “vague and insufficient to ensure accuracy and consistency” and “fail to adequately protect and document chain of custody of ballots,” Hobbs said.

She added that “untested, uncertified systems” had been used in the tallying of ballots. She also expressed concerns about the people who had been hired to do the counting.

To make her point, Hobbs pointed out that Anthony Kern had somehow been allowed to be one of the counters. Kern is a former GOP state representative who led the “Stop the Steal” movement in Arizona and was photographed among the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Arizona Mirror: Where was Anthony Kern on Jan. 6?

“Given what was known about Mr. Kern before this ‘audit,’ and his inclusion regardless, one must wonder what procedures are truly being used to recruit and screen others involved in the counting of ballots,” Hobbs wrote in the letter.

According to The Guardian’s Sam Levine, who observed the Maricopa County auditors this week, the election review is occurring at a “slow and sleepy” pace, and potentially “dubious technology” is being used to verify ballots.

NOTE: The lease of the “Madhouse on McDowell” runs out this Friday, and the MAGA/QAnon cult members of the Arizona Senate have no idea what to do next with the ballots, or where to take their GQP sham “fraudit.” They will be nowhere close to done counting the 2.1 million ballots.

(Only about 250,000 of the county’s 2.1 million ballots have been processed in the hand recount that is a central part of the review, Ken Bennett, a liaison between those conducting the review and the senators, said on Saturday. At that rate, the hand recount would not be finished until August.)

You know this GQP sham “fraudit” is not a legitimate audit. The state of Georgia began a full hand-count audit of over 5 million ballots cast on November 13, and by November 19, the hand tally of the presidential race in Georgia was complete, and the results affirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s lead over Republican President Donald Trump. Georgia hand count of votes affirms Biden’s narrow victory over Trump.

So what the hell is taking this sham “fraudit” so long? Because Cyber Ninjas is only recruiting volunteers from among Trump supporters, they do not have enough volunteers every day to do a legitimate hand-count audit. Cyber Ninjas is also chasing every QAnon conspiracy theory down the rabbit hole, like looking for “secret water marks” that do not exist, and doing some unproven test on the paper ballots for bamboo fiber, trying to prove a QAnon conspiracy theory that some 40,000 ballots were flown in from South Korea. (Wouldn’t that also invalidate the results of every state legislative race and county race in Maricopa County as well? Doh!)

At least one Republican Senator who voted in favor of this GQP sham “fraudit” has now had a change of heart after seeing how this shitshow has been operated. The New York Times reports, In Arizona, a Troubled Voting Review Plods On as Questions Mount (excerpt):

After a week marked by mounting accusations of partisan skulduggery, mismanagement and even potential illegality, at least one Republican supporter of the new count said it could not end soon enough.

“It makes us look like idiots,” State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, said on Friday. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”

Senate President “Krazy Karen” Fann is doubling down on her QAnon nuttery. From the New York Times:

In her reply to the Department of Justice, Sen. Fann defended the review, saying it is being conducted under “comprehensive and rigorous security protocols that will fully preserve all physical and electronic ballots, tabulation systems and other election materials.” [Not true.]

But she appeared to back away from the plan to personally interview voters, stating that the State Senate “determined several weeks ago that it would indefinitely defer that component of the audit.” [Because it is illegal.]

Sen. Fann, who had largely remained silent about criticism of the review, chose last week to mount a public defense of it. Appearing in an interview on the Phoenix PBS news outlet, she applauded the role of One America News in supporting the review and said the Senate had no role in choosing Mr. Kern or others who counted votes. [So she abdicated the Senate’s responsibility of any oversight of this audit.]

“I don’t know why he’s there or how he got there, but that’s one of the people that was selected, and that is what it is,” she said. “I don’t know that it’s a great thing, to be honest.”

And she said that the news media had blown concerns about the objectivity and management of the review out of proportion.

“They talk about conspiracy theories,” she said, referring to reports that the review is examining ballots for evidence of bamboo fibers and watermarks baselessly said to be signs of fraud. “But I tell you what, there’s almost a reverse conspiracy theory to demean this audit.”

She suggested that her support of the review would be proved right in the end.

“I think we’ll find irregularities that is going to say, you know what, there’s this many dead people voted, or this many who may have voted that don’t live here any more — we’re going to find those,” she said. “We know they exist, but everybody keeps saying, ‘You have no proof.’ Well, maybe we’ll get the proof out of this so we can fix those holes that are there.”

I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g’joob

This insanity is about to take another dark turn this this week.

That one vote was Senator Paul Boyer, who is now embarrassed to be state senator at this point.

You just knew that Kelli “Chemtrails” Ward, who is fighting an audit of her own disputed election as chair of the AZ Republican Sedition Party (See Constantine Querard Twitter feed) would weigh in on this latest controversy.

The Department of Justice needs to step in and end this shitshow right now.





Advertisement

Discover more from Blog for Arizona

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

2 thoughts on “Trump’s MAGA Red Cap Thugs Are Making Death Threats To Secretary of State Katie Hobbs”

  1. David Graham writes at The Atlantic, “The Unfolding Disaster in Arizona”, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/arizonas-election-audit-is-a-trainwreck/618834/

    [This] audit has gone on too long without enough protocols and with potential danger to evidence, so there can already be no faith in the result.

    But that misses the point. The problem is not that the audit is now not credible, but that it was never credible in the first place. The audit could never have succeeded. If Cyber Ninjas finishes and announces that it has validated the original results in Maricopa County, that result still wouldn’t satisfy angry Trump supporters, for the same reason that the state Senate conducted the audit in the first place: If you lie to some people long enough, they’ll believe you. And if Cyber Ninjas claims it has evidence of widespread fraud, practically no one who didn’t already believe fraud claims is likely to be persuaded, because the company’s qualifications, conduct, and statements give no reason to trust it. (Beyond that, even if the audit were to magically produce evidence of fraud, there’s no process for overturning an election that has already been certified.)

    Arizona has long been one of the best states in the country for election administration. If the state Senate had stuck to the principles it had laid out in the law, all of this could have been avoided. Instead, legislators not only threw out their own statutes, but endorsed a process that embodies all of their concerns about the election. As a result, the audit is certain to end badly—even if no one yet knows when or how.

  2. UPDATE: The Arizona Republic reports, “Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone blasts Arizona Senate’s election audit demand as a risk to law enforcement”, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2021/05/08/maricopa-co-sheriff-says-arizona-election-audit-risks-law-enforcement/5004443001/

    Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone called the Arizona Senate’s demands for its audit of Maricopa County’s presidential election “mind-numbingly reckless and irresponsible.”

    Penzone said the law enforcement agency would be at risk if the county turned over the state Senate’s intensified demand for certain routers, or digital copies of the routers. The Senate also is demanding certain administrative passwords to voting machines that county officials say they do not have.

    Providing the routers could compromise confidential, sensitive and highly classified law enforcement data and equipment, he said in a statement on Friday.

    “The Senate Republican Caucus’ audit of the Maricopa County votes from last November’s election has no stopping point. Now, its most recent demands jeopardize the entire mission of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office,” Penzone’s statement said.

    [Maricopa] county did not deliver certain routers that the state Senate sought in its original subpoenas, according to Senate liaison Ken Bennett.

    County Attorney Allister Adel explained in a letter to Bennett earlier this week that turning over the routers or “virtual images” of routers, poses a significant security risk to Sheriff’s Office law enforcement data, and “puts sensitive, confidential data belonging to Maricopa County’s citizens — including social security numbers and protected health information — at risk as well.”

    “We also learned that if criminal elements or others gained access to this data, it might compromise county and federal law enforcement efforts and put the lives of law enforcement personnel at risk,” Adel wrote.

    The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors met Friday in a closed-door session to discuss the issue, saying in the meeting agenda that the state Senate had indicated it would “take action” against the county and supervisors if the county doesn’t provide the routers and passwords.

    After discussing the issue, Republican Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers released a statement saying that the county could not provide the routers because of the security concerns, but also because doing so will “cripple County operations and cost as much as $6 million” if the county has to replace the routers while the auditors have them.

    Penzone said that no matter what steps a private contractor promises to take, meeting the state Senate’s demand could compromise the integrity of classified data, private information and law enforcement materials.

    “Access to this information would adversely affect the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office ability to protect critical evidence, data shared between law enforcement agencies, protected private information and individual passwords, all of which could be used to the detriment of citizens and law enforcement infrastructure,” Penzone’s statement said.

    The sheriff said transparency and accountability are democracy’s foundation. “But when these words are misrepresented, it defies the fragile balance that exists between freedom and order and all that we believe in.”

    [T]he passwords, according to Bennett, would give the auditors administrative access to voting machines.

    But the county says it does not have the administrative passwords.

    “The county has provided every password, user name and security key in its custody or control, as commanded by the Senate’s subpoenas, and does not have any others,” Adel wrote in her letter to Bennett.

    Sellers said he wouldn’t address “every allegation that people cook up these days.” But he did, in a lengthy statement on Friday, take up the push for passwords.

    The password and security tokens the Senate wants provides access to Dominion Voting Systems’ proprietary firmware and source code.

    “Elections administrators do not need to access this information to hold an election, and we do not have it in our custody,” Sellers said.

Comments are closed.