By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — As top attorneys for Donald Trump visited here to hear testimony on election fraud, some weak-kneed Arizona Republican officials served as a reminder of why Trump’s aggressive stances were attractive to ordinary Republicans yearning for leadership and courage.
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani noted that the very day he and campaign attorney Jenna Ellis were here for an important hearing with state legislators and witnesses, on November 30, GOP Gov. Doug Ducey and Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs hurried along to certify an Arizona win for Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Although some leading Grand Canyon State legislators sat in a row to participate with Giuliani and Ellis in a hotel ballroom, the current Republican leaders of the Arizona House and Senate had declined to authorize the gathering as an official session.
While serving in the State Senate in August 2017, the left-wing Hobbs had tweeted that Trump “is on the side of the freaking Nazis,” and was “pandering to his neo-Nazi base.” She was elected secretary of state in November 2018.
Ducey long had been in the orbit of the late U.S. Sen. John McCain and once served as a financial bundler for McCain, whose politically liberal widow, Cindy, endorsed Biden’s presidential candidacy.
Giuliani said Ducey wouldn’t even meet with him during his end-of-November visit.
Phoenix radio talk host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) said on December 1 that the McCain political machine clout didn’t die with the senator, back in August 2018. Harris pointed to a video showing Ducey receiving a call from the White House as he was about to sign the voting certification, but Ducey turned off the distinctive ringtone and set the phone on his desk.
The Arizona hearing was only one of a number of activities in swing states to expose manipulation and deceit to steal the presidency from pro-life Trump and try to award it to wan bad Catholic Biden.
After Biden supposedly injured his foot on November 28 when playing with his dog, the conservative Seeing Red AZ blog suggested on November 30 that “the feeble senior citizen stumbled and fell” instead. Or perhaps Biden, who had been known to fly off the handle, became impatient and kicked something too hard while waiting for Trump to concede the election?
Hilariously, some media stories asserted that the Arizona hearing was about “baseless” and “unfounded” claims regarding election fraud, although a daylong program included actual witnesses who gave their personal experiences, as well as statistical experts who explained the flaws and impossibilities of Biden’s alleged Arizona win.
At the end of the day, which stretched to nearly 7:30 p.m., the hearing was told additional witnesses still waited to testify, but the hotel wanted to reclaim its ballroom space.
During the day, a booming “Stop the Steal” rally was held just outside the hotel, with numerous U.S. flags and Trump banners waving as speakers climbed up a stepladder that served as their impromptu platform.
One of these outdoors speakers said the message is that they’re no longer Republicans, they’re Trump supporters — apparently referring to those who continue feeling let down by the official party but inspired by Trump’s determination.
“Guys, we’re at a time in our country when evil is testing us,” a man told the rally, adding that he’s getting messages of support from around the world, including Israel, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Koreas.
Prayers were offered amid the talks.
Citing widespread interest in the Phoenix hearing, an organizer told The Wanderer on November 29 that its event page had been viewed 92,000 times “in the last three days.”
The hearing had been scheduled to run from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Starting with an opening prayer at 9:12, it took an hour for lunch then ended at 7:27 p.m. at the hotel’s urging, even though additional witnesses were on hand.
Early in the hearing, Giuliani said, “This election was the subject of a conspiracy that goes back before the election” and was hatched by Democratic leaders. Most Democrats are ethical, he said, but not these leaders, who had been corrupted back in the Bill Clinton administration.
Many prominent Democrats and Republicans previously had warned of the dangers to voting security by expansive mail-in ballots, Giuliani said, until Trump became president.
Fraudulent mail-in ballots were the backup strategy for 2020, to be dumped into the voting if Trump got too far ahead, Giuliani said, recalling that the president had been far up in swing states including 800,000 votes in Pennsylvania and 300,000 in Michigan, then the counting was stopped and hordes of false ballots brought in.
Giuliani said he “became very discouraged” at seeing some leaders cower over attempts to verify a fair and honest election. When he was a federal prosecutor, Giuliani said, vote fraud “was a crime. . . . It is clear that the numbers are false” in this election.
Following his comments, co-counsel Ellis said they’re not asking the Arizona legislators to overturn an election but to ensure its accuracy. This isn’t an option they have, she said, but their duty.
Retired Army colonel and cybersecurity specialist Phil Waldron told the hearing that national cybersecurity expert Chris Krebs had been incorrect to say recently that this election was secure, and that the controversial Dominion machines widely used for this voting were “not connected to the Internet.”
Waldron said they were connected to the Internet, and that the Dominion user’s manual even tells its operators how to make the connection — which dangerously compromises vote security. “The voting record is allowed to be modified” or otherwise altered by administrators, Waldron said.
Waldron said Maricopa County — by far Arizona’s most populous county, where Phoenix is county seat — didn’t validate the signatures on the envelopes of 1.9 million mail-in ballots.
So, Giuliani said, these were “never checked for fraud, deceit, mistakes,” and it’s too late to do so now because the envelopes had been separated from their ballots.
Later Waldron said that if signatures weren’t verified, the chain of security was broken. He added that “several affidavits were provided to the legal teams” about ballots being shipped into Arizona for the Grand Canyon State’s voting.
Witness Anna Orth, from Pima County — where Tucson is county seat — testified that she was a poll watcher on November 3. She said many people told her they didn’t ask for early ballots but received them anyway. Arizona doesn’t mail out ballots to everyone, but only those who ask. This suggested that unrequested ballots could fall into others’ hands.
Matt Braynard, leader of the Voter Integrity Project (VIP), told the hearing of how his anti-fraud organization tests information from actual records. Braynard recently told Fox News host Lou Dobbs that VIP provides “hard evidence of potentially illegal ballots cast” to various states’ officials.
“I’m not sending them charts or line graphs or speculation about what may or may not have happened,” he told Dobbs, but names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and voter-record numbers of people who either had ballots cast in their names but didn’t vote, people who shouldn’t have voted, or people who cast ballots in multiple states.
Based solely on the information uncovered here, Braynard said, “we believe that that surpasses the margin of victory in enough states to deny Joe Biden a win in the Electoral College.”
At the Arizona hearing, Braynard gave examples including a voter in Tennessee who was recorded as casting an Arizona vote that he wasn’t aware of, because he actually voted in Tennessee; a felon who knows he’s not allowed to vote, but a ballot was cast in his name; as well as people who had moved away from Arizona, thereby invalidating their registration here, but still showed up as voting here.
A retired university professor who was a tabulation observer in Maricopa County saw ballot envelopes with “just scribbles” for names, with signatures being accepted that “were not what they were trying to compare to.”
She also saw tabulators with purses, cellphones, and backpacks at their tables, which made her worry about lack of security. “I am truly concerned for our future as a nation, and as a state.”
Giuliani said the approach of Arizona officials Ducey and Hobbs to the election returns was, “See no evil. . . . Just ignore it.”
One of the legislators reminded the hearing that a change of only 5,500 votes would have made Trump the Arizona winner. Biden was reckoned to have beaten Trump by three-tenths of one percent.
Massachusetts scientist Shiva Ayyadurai testified by Zoom to note a point also mentioned elsewhere, that votes were being allocated by percentages. Thus, a vote for Biden in Maricopa County counted as 1.3 votes, while one vote for Trump counted as only 0.7 percent of one. “So basically votes were being eaten for Mr. Trump” and handed to Biden, he said.
Trump phoned in just after 5 p.m. Mountain Time to tell the audience he was watching the hearing, and had thought he would win re-election with 68 million votes, but he got a reported 74 million and still lost, revealing that “Games (were played) like no one’s ever seen before. . . . They know who won, and we won by a lot.”
The president voiced determination to continue this fight. People say “focus on 2024, sir,” Trump said, but the focus has to stay on 2020 because it was a huge scam.
He also attacked Ducey for the rush to certify Biden. “Arizona will not forget what Ducey just did,” Trump said. “. . . We didn’t lose the state. We won it by a lot.” Trump said the Republican legislators here fighting for election integrity “are becoming legends for taking it on.”
Maricopa County Republican Party Chairwoman Linda Brickman, a tabulation observer, said supervisors kept lowering standards for signature verification, in order to move the process faster, and approved ballots whose envelope signatures were entirely different.
Brickman said she saw at least 30 ballot envelopes at one time with the same handwriting for all of the different names, and also saw Trump ballots being counted for Biden.
As for Ducey’s action, Brickman said, “My personal opinion, I think he was bought and paid for.”
Giuliani said that if such fraud had occurred when he was mayor of New York City, those involved would have been fired and investigated. Later he added, “It’s a much worse situation than I realized before I came here. . . . Your counting rooms and voting rooms were filled with Internet connections.”
A tabulating machine “should be a self-contained unit” that just holds results, Giuliani said. “You can’t certify this vote and not know the extent to which Dominion changed the vote. . . .
“This is having stolen an election from the people of Arizona,” he said.
Ellis told the legislators that “the law is on your side,” and that anyone telling them to just let Biden’s certification go through is being “absolutely false. . . . You are the sole guardian to correct a corrupted election. . . . You have not held an election in the manner that was prescribed.”
The Spirit Of 1776
Southern Arizona Republican Rep. Mark Finchem said the hearing listened to “good, old-fashioned racketeering, but on a grand scale.” Recalling the revolutionary spirit that had stirred the colonists against their British masters, Finchem said that a few men stood on a green and fired their rifles at the best military machine of the 1700s in the world.
Finchem said he was calling for a special legislative session right now, and also that a grand jury be convened. So much criminal activity related to the election, he said, went on here and around the country. “When Satan wants to extinguish a light, he will stop at nothing. . . . So be prepared to fight.”
He cited tremendous pressure against the legislators for wanting to hold the hearing.
Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer on November 30 that Ducey had been two-faced.
“Gov. Ducey’s political fortunes have been orbiting around McCain’s sphere of betrayal from his early days in Arizona, but still managed to dance well enough with President Trump to give some the impression he was a supporter. So much so, we now call him Gov. Chameleon,” he said.
“Just three of his many betrayals have been support of gun-control laws, succumbing to teacher-union strikes, and his boasting of ‘Arizona being open for business’ when he actually had shut down businesses during the Chicom pandemic,” Haney said. “Following this, he was booed by thousands of conservatives for these egregious hypocrisies at President Trump’s rallies.”
Referring to the State Senate and House leaders declining to allow the November 30 hearing to be an official session, he said, “I have had no confidence in the Arizona legislative leadership since former Senate President Andy Biggs was elected to the U.S. Congress four years ago.
“When Biggs was in Arizona leadership, he was able to prevent leftist legislation, but especially the National Popular Vote, which would have passed with the support of Republican legislators,” Haney said.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress