by Nicholas Wu
Politico
01/10/2022 04:30 AM EST
Updated: 01/10/2022 12:28 PM EST
Highlights:
The select panel asked states for any scrap of evidence to justify allegations of election fraud that Trump baselessly promoted, focusing much of its efforts on officials in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those states found virtually no evidence of fraud, according to Thompson....
Just one day before Georgia was set to certify the 2020 election results and seal Trump’s defeat, records turned over to the Jan. 6 committee show a text message that arrived on the phone of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“Mr Secretary. Mark Meadows here. If you could give me a brief call at your convenience. Thank you,” the then-White House chief of staff texted Raffensperger in a Nov. 19, 2020, message obtained through a public records request.
It doesn’t appear that Raffensperger, a Republican, responded to Meadows....
Meadows texted Raffensperger a second time on the morning of Dec. 5, 2020, asking him to call the White House switchboard to set up a call. “Your voicemail is full,” Meadows told Raffensperger....
A previously unreported email from one of Raffensperger’s top aides, Jordan Fuchs, was also turned over to the committee. In it, Fuchs responded to Meadows' Dec. 22, 2020, trip to Georgia's Cobb County during the state’s signature match audit. She emailed Meadows to “clarify a few items” about the rejection rate of absentee ballots — something Trump and his allies had alleged was much lower than normal.
Fuchs’ note included the text of a press release sent out by the secretary of State’s office a month beforehand with a more thorough explanation of how the office evaluated absentee ballots....
Also included in the document dump are emails between Sen. Lindsey Graham’s and Raffensperger’s offices, which shows how a previously reported call between the two officials came about roughly two weeks after the 2020 election.
“Hope you are doing well. Senator Graham has requested a call w/ Sec. Raffensperger at his earliest convenience,” a Graham staffer told two of Raffensperger’s top aides on Nov. 12, 2020. The call between the two men ended with Graham indicating to Raffensperger some ballots should be tossed out, the Georgia official said later.[!!!]...
The state also turned over a previously reported audio recording of a Dec. 23, 2020, call between Trump and Frances Watson, the chief investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, and a brief call between Watson and an unidentified staffer. In the Dec. 23 call, Trump had urged Watson to find “dishonesty” in the state’s election results.[!!!]
-- Jan. 6 panel ramps up investigation into Trump's state-level pressure [Forged election documents in Michigan and Arizona], by Nicholas Wu
POLITICO has identified the information the committee has received from key swing states, as lawmakers prepare to take their findings public.
The public focus of Congress’ Jan. 6 investigation, so far, is what happened in Washington, D.C. Behind the scenes, the probe’s state-level work is kicking into overdrive.
The House committee investigating the Capitol attack has gathered thousands of records from state officials and interviewed a slate of witnesses as it attempts to retrace former President Donald Trump's attempts to subvert the 2020 election, particularly in four key states that swung the presidency to Joe Biden. They're getting ready to take their work public, possibly as soon as the spring.
“We want to let the public see and hear from those individuals who conducted elections in those states,” select panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in an interview. He described those witnesses as particularly important given their mandates to keep elections “fair and impartial” while hailing from one political party.
The voluminous documents state election officials have sent the Jan. 6 committee, obtained by POLITICO through open records requests, underscore the depth of Trump's pressure campaign directed at the typically lower-level administrators of presidential balloting. The emails, texts and phone recordings also add consequential context to previously reported incidents, such as Trump’s call to Georgia's top elections investigator and Mark Meadows’ outreach to Georgia election officials.
The select panel asked states for any scrap of evidence to justify allegations of election fraud that Trump baselessly promoted, focusing much of its efforts on officials in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those states found virtually no evidence of fraud, according to Thompson.
Among the officials who spoke with the committee was Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's secretary of state during the 2020 election, according to a source familiar with the situation not authorized to speak publicly. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania secretary of state declined to comment on whether the panel had been in touch with the state’s officials.
Mainly, the records show state officials trying to either mollify or ignore Trump and his allies without distorting election results or embracing debunked claims of vote tampering. A spokesperson for the select panel declined to comment on the documents.
Pressure in Georgia
Just one day before Georgia was set to certify the 2020 election results and seal Trump’s defeat, records turned over to the Jan. 6 committee show a text message that arrived on the phone of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“Mr Secretary. Mark Meadows here. If you could give me a brief call at your convenience. Thank you,” the then-White House chief of staff texted Raffensperger in a Nov. 19, 2020, message obtained through a public records request.
It doesn’t appear that Raffensperger, a Republican, responded to Meadows. (His office sent no reply to one Meadows text because aides weren't sure if it was real, according to CNN.) But it was not the last time Raffensperger would hear from Trump’s allies as they sought to pressure state-level officials to overturn the president's loss.
A spokesperson for Georgia's secretary of state did not respond to a request for comment.
Meadows texted Raffensperger a second time on the morning of Dec. 5, 2020, asking him to call the White House switchboard to set up a call. “Your voicemail is full,” Meadows told Raffensperger.
Raffensperger has already interviewed with the panel, according to Thompson, who praised him as “very straightforward” in his testimony.
A previously unreported email from one of Raffensperger’s top aides, Jordan Fuchs, was also turned over to the committee. In it, Fuchs responded to Meadows' Dec. 22, 2020, trip to Georgia's Cobb County during the state’s signature match audit. She emailed Meadows to “clarify a few items” about the rejection rate of absentee ballots — something Trump and his allies had alleged was much lower than normal.
Fuchs’ note included the text of a press release sent out by the secretary of State’s office a month beforehand with a more thorough explanation of how the office evaluated absentee ballots.
Meadows' attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Also included in the document dump are emails between Sen. Lindsey Graham’s and Raffensperger’s offices, which shows how a previously reported call between the two officials came about roughly two weeks after the 2020 election.
“Hope you are doing well. Senator Graham has requested a call w/ Sec. Raffensperger at his earliest convenience,” a Graham staffer told two of Raffensperger’s top aides on Nov. 12, 2020. The call between the two men ended with Graham indicating to Raffensperger some ballots should be tossed out, the Georgia official said later.[!!!]
Graham’s office declined to comment.
The state also turned over a previously reported audio recording of a Dec. 23, 2020, call between Trump and Frances Watson, the chief investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, and a brief call between Watson and an unidentified staffer. In the Dec. 23 call, Trump had urged Watson to find “dishonesty” in the state’s election results.[!!!]
Forged election documents in Michigan and Arizona
As Trump's team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents.
Spokespeople for the Michigan and Arizona secretaries of state declined to comment on the documents. The offices confirmed that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, both Democrats, and their staff met with the panel in November.
“They mostly discussed election administration in Arizona, the 2020 elections, threats/harassment directed toward the office, and the Cyber Ninja’s partisan ballot review,” said Hobbs' spokesperson C. Murphy Hebert.
Benson and her staff took questions from the committee on the 2020 election and events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, according to Tracy Wimmer, a spokesperson for Benson.
The National Archives sent emails to the Arizona secretary of state on Dec. 11, 2020, passing along the forged certificates “for your awareness” and informing the state officials the Archives would not accept them.
Arizona then took legal action against at least one of the groups who sent in the fake documents, sending a cease and desist letter to a pro-Trump "sovereign citizen" group telling them to stop using the state seal and referring the matter to the state attorney general.
“By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona’s November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” Hobbs wrote to one of the pro-Trump groups.
That group’s leader, Lori Osiecki, had told the Arizona Republic in December 2020 that she decided to send in the certificates after taking part in post-election rallies and after attending a daylong meeting in Phoenix that had included Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
The group that forged the Michigan certification had not used the state seal, and it appears state officials there took no further action after the Archives rejected it.
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
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Hobbs asks AG to investigate fake Trump electors for employing Arizona's state seal
Dylan Smith
TucsonSentinel.com
Posted Dec 24, 2020, 3:06 pm
A group of people who sent a slate of fake electoral votes for President Donald Trump to Washington, D.C., may be facing legal trouble for using the state seal without authorization.
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, one of the 11 fake electors, demanding that her group no longer use Arizona's state seal. The state requires people to get the secretary of state's permission to "use, display or otherwise employ any facsimile, copy, likeness, imitation or other resemblance" to the state seal, which Hobbs said the group didn't do.
Hobbs also referred the matter to the Attorney General's Office for investigation. Using the state seal without authorization is a class 3 misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.
Osiecki and 10 others, who identified themselves as "The Sovereign Citizens of the Great State of Arizona," sent signed, notarized certificates to the National Archives purporting to be electoral votes for Trump, despite the fact that former Vice President Joe Biden won Arizona by about 10,500 votes. They also sent a copy of their faux electoral votes to the Secretary of State's Office. The state seal was on the cover sheet of the documents, as well as at the top of each subsequent page.
"By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona's November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions," Hobbs wrote in her letter, dated Dec. 22.
Osiecki could not be reached for comment.
The group cast its fake electoral votes as Trump supporters across the country rejected the results of the presidential election. Many Trump supporters, as well as the president himself, have falsely claimed the election was swayed by fraud and have spread baseless conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims, particularly about Biden's win in Arizona and five other swing states.
Osiecki and her cohorts were not the official Republican electors who were pledged to vote for Trump if the president had won Arizona in the 2020 general election.
Arizona's official Republican electors, which includes several prominent GOP officials, submitted fake electoral votes of their own on Dec. 14, the date when electors across the nation cast their votes. The Arizona Republican Party said the votes would be sent to Congress, where it hopes they will be counted as Arizona's official electoral votes on Jan. 6, when Congress will count and certify the votes of the Electoral College.
Some Republicans believe that Congress can reject Biden electors and instead certify Trump as the winner of the election. The notion is widely rejected because both the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate would have to vote to reject a slate of electors.
Were the votes of Arizona's Republican electors to somehow be counted, they would be deemed invalid under state law. Arizona is one of 33 states prohibiting "faithless electors," a term for electors who cast their votes for a candidate other than their state's winner. If an Arizona elector casts a vote for someone besides the winner, his or her position would be immediately deemed vacant, and the chair of the political party representing the winner would choose a replacement.
This report was first published by the Arizona Mirror
*********************
'Sovereign citizens' try to undermine Arizona electoral vote
by Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
Pinal Central
Dec 14, 2020 Updated Jan 23, 2021 0
PHOENIX — Arizona’s 11 Democrat electors cast their votes Monday for Joe Biden even as the chairman of a Senate panel said he will issue subpoenas to check the accuracy of hardware and software that gave the Democrat the edge over President Trump.
Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, R-Gilbert, said there are enough questions raised about whether the Dominion Voting Systems used in Maricopa County produced reliable results.
The announcement followed more than six hours of testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee which led to a series of questions about whether the results can be trusted. And as Farnsworth said, that doesn’t even address other allegations that ballots were not properly handled and that observers from political parties did not have sufficient access to oversee what was going on.
It’s unlikely that anything that an audit turns up would affect the results of the election.
That would require either a court ruling overturning the results — something multiple judges have so far refused to do — or the full legislature trying to pick its own slate of electors. But both Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers have said there does not appear to be a legal way to do that, even assuming lawmakers could call themselves into special session before Jan. 6 when Congress counts the electoral votes.
Even Farnsworth, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, suggested that this was simply a matter of addressing the various claims and doubts “and try and see if we can reinsert some confidence in our election process.’’
“We hold and audit and we see what the outcome is,’’ he said. “And then we can put this to rest.’’
Farnsworth said the subpoenas could be issued as early as Tuesday.
All this comes as the official slate of electors — the ones pledged to Biden — cast their votes and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs sent off the results to both Congress and the National Archives.
That, however, did not stop two other groups from filing reports that their “electors’’ had met and were supporting Trump.
One group consists of the 11 Republicans whose names were on the ballot as pledged to Trump, who lost the popular vote according to the certified results.
That vote was organized by the state GOP on the premise that those outstanding legal challenges to the Arizona tally could end up changing the final vote total. In essence, Kelli Ward, the party chair who is a litigant in both pending cases, believes that having the Trump-pledged electors voting on Monday — the date set in federal law — sends a slate of GOP electors to Congress should the cases go their way or Congress decides that their votes are the ones that should be counted and not those pledged to Biden.
But Hobbs aide Murphy Hebert said that’s meaningless.
“It’s clearly a political gesture,’’ she said. Hebert said Congress can acknowledge only those electors whose votes are accompanied by “letters of ascertainment’’ signed by Hobbs and Gov. Doug Ducey.
Separately, a group of self-proclaimed “sovereign citizens’’ filed their own slate of electors with the National Archives claiming they represent the state’s 11 electoral votes for Trump.
Documents obtained by Capitol Media Services show that Mesa resident Lori Osiecki submitted sworn statements for the 11 people “by authority & direction of the sovereign citizens of the great state of Arizona.’’ That comes complete with the use of the official state seal which in and of itself Hebert said is itself a violation of the law.
“We absolutely anticipated there would be efforts to disrupt the system like this,’’ Hebert said. But she said the actual “votes’’ sent to Washington amount to little more than political theater.
“The statute is very, very clear: The slate of electors for the candidate with the most number of votes in the popular vote are the ones who represent the state in the Electoral College vote,’’ she said. And these were the 11 Democrats who took the official oath of office Monday morning and signed the certificate of votes.
And what of the “votes’’ sent off by on behalf of either slate of 11 Republicans?
“Anybody can send a letter to the National Archives,’’ Hobbs said.
One thing different this year is that the process, normally a routine action with little public attention, was moved to the Phoenix Convention Center. And the location was not made public ahead of the event amid security concerns, including threats of violence against Hobbs and other staffers in her office and fears protesters might seek to disrupt the voting.
At the same time members of the Senate Judiciary were focused on Dominion Voting Systems used in the state’s largest county.
There have been a series of charges leveled against the company both here and nationally that the equipment and software were deliberately programmed to deliver more votes for Biden.
None of those complaints have been found valid by any court anywhere in the nation. But that didn’t stop lawmakers from asking and saying that there needs to be an independent audit and even a full hand count of all the ballots.
Sen. Vince Leach, R-Tucson, one of those who wants that 100% hand count, got Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett to acknowledge that Dominion workers had 24/7 access to his office and even, in certain circumstances, access to the equipment.
But Jarrett said there is no way to alter the codes in a way that would change the outcome.
He said it starts with “logic and accuracy’’ test of the equipment, both before and after the election. Jarrett said that would not only capture any change made in the software but that the program is built in a way so that any change would render the results “not readable.’’
The equipment itself, he said, is also subject to independent certification by the Secretary of State’s Office.
More to the point, Jarrett pointed out that state law requires an actual hand count of a random sample of ballots, both those mailed in early and those cast on Election Day.
He said the batches to be sampled and the elections to be reviewed are chosen by officials from both political parties. And of the more than 47,000 ballots checked by hand there was not a single vote difference from what was recorded by the equipment.
“These hand counts are an independent audit,’’ Jarrett told lawmakers. And he said they showed the equipment worked as expected.
Farnsworth was not convinced.
“I do have a concern that the county is taking the position that it just can’t happen,’’ he said.
“There is a litany of white-collar crimes, digital crimes in the history of this country and this world of some very sophisticated people and the victims didn’t recognize it until some future time,’’ Farnsworth said. “I think it’s really, really dangerous for us to say, ‘It can’t happen.’ ‘’
That sentiment was echoed by Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City. He said even the operating manual for Dominion software suggests “data can be changed and votes switched around.’’
“Nothing’s 100% secure,’’ he said. “If people want to cheat they’re going to cheat.’’
Farnsworth also complained that it’s possible for people who are not U.S. citizens to have voted in the presidential race.
Arizona does require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
But a federal law spells out that people without such proof can use a registration form prepared by the Election Assistance Commission, one that has no such requirement. And those who do not provide citizenship proof can vote in federal elections, including for president and members of Congress.
Jarrett acknowledged that more than 3,000 such “federal-only’’ ballots were cast in Maricopa County, people who he acknowledged might not be U.S. citizens. That angered Farnsworth.
“That is harmful, detrimental, undercuts,’’ he said.
“And it is outrageous that we have that kind of a mandate from Congress,’’ Farnsworth said. “It challenges the very sovereignty of this country, in my opinion.’’
Jarrett also defended against claims that observers from political parties could not get close enough to really monitor what was going on in both the process to check signatures on early ballot envelopes and in the actual counting. He acknowledged, though, that there were efforts to keep observers at least six feet from election workers amid fears of COVID-19.
He also said that, despite rumors to the contrary, there were not late “spikes’’ of votes for Biden. In fact, Jarrett said, the reverse was in some ways true, with Biden having a big lead among the first ballots counted and the later-counted ballots swinging for Trump.
