'We are very concerned that the auditors are engaged in ongoing and imminent violations of federal voting and election laws...'
Following lockstep with threats made earlier by Democrat lawyers representing a cabal of globalist powermongers, Joe Biden’s Justice Department stepped into the partisan fray to discredit Arizona’s ongoing audit of the 2020 election.
Among those involved in the plot are groups with ties to former president Barack Obama, billionaire George Soros and the Chinese Communist Party.
Prior to the start of the audit, lawyers including Perkins Coie’s Marc Elias attempted to intimidate four potential cybersecurity firms from proceeding by mailing cease and desist letters that dangled the threat of DOJ scrutiny as punishment for their participation.
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“Importantly, your companies cannot escape liability for voter intimidation by cloaking your activities under the guise of a so-called ‘audit,’” said the letters, which hinted at violations of civil rights laws including the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
“As the Department of Justice has previously explained, one can violate federal voting rights law even when it is purportedly part of an effort to investigate election crimes and fraud,” the letters threatened.
True to their word, on Wednesday, the Justice Department expressed concern about ballot security and potential voter intimidation arising from the Maricopa County recount.
Both claims have been oft-repeated talking points in the endless onslaught of legal challenges, all of which failed to thwart or delay the audit effort.
The radical leftist head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pamela S. Karlan, claimed the Senate’s farming out of 2.1 million ballots from the state’s most populous county to a contractor may run afoul of federal law requiring ballots to remain in the control of elections officials for 22 months.
In a letter to Arizona’s GOP Senate President Karen Fann, Karlan also claimed that the Senate contractor’s plans to directly contact voters could amount to illegal voter intimidation.
“Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan wrote. “Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future.”
Karlan demanded that Fann lay out how the Senate and its contractors will ensure federal laws are followed, even though judges have already ruled on similar challenges and determined that Arizona’s legislature is within the scope of its authority.
To support her assertions, Karlan pointed to left-wing media reports alleging lax security at the former basketball arena where the ballots are being recounted by hand.
A local reporter for AZFamily.com gloated about breaching the coliseum prior to the arrival of the ballots.
Afterward, Democrat media shrilly complained about the lack of access, until Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin determined that they should be allowed inside.
Fann said Senate attorneys were working on a response she promised to share when it was completed.
The Justice Department letter came six days after activist groups asked federal officials to intervene or send monitors to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix at the state fairgrounds, where the ballots are being recounted.
“We are very concerned that the auditors are engaged in ongoing and imminent violations of federal voting and election laws,” said the letter sent by the radical leftist Brennan Center for Justice, the Leadership Conference and Protect Democracy.
In other developments, the Arizona Democratic Party reached a deal Wednesday with the Republican-controlled state Senate to ensure that voter and ballot privacy were guaranteed.
The agreement further articulated Martin’s court order, which required the Senate and its contractor, Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, to follow state laws around ballot privacy.
Any violations of the agreement would be enforceable by seeking an emergency court order.
The agreement also put in writing a verbal agreement between the Senate and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs that allowed her to have three observers inside the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the state fairgrounds.
Under the court order, the Senate and Cyber Ninjas last week released their policies and procedures for the recount.
Hobbs’ elections director, Bo Dul, told The Associated Press there were major problems with those rules, including that they seemed haphazard, lacked specifics and left much room for interpretation—something that they claim is never allowed in ballot counts.
Investigations have revealed otherwise, indicating that ballots during the Nov. 3 election were often sent for further screening after scanning, and that technicians with companies such as Dominion Voting Systems may have had the power to discount them based on arbitrary judgment with no follow-up notification.
The purpose of the Arizona audit is simply to verify that the numbers presented by Maricopa election officials align with the actual tally of legitimate, registered voters.
Dul claimed, however, that the policies allowed counters to accept a large enough error rate to perhaps show Trump won the state.
Such an outcome would not change the outcome of the election because the results were certified months ago in the state and Congress, but it would validate the longstanding allegations of a “Big Lie” perpetuated by leftist conspirators to undermine the vote in several key battleground states including Arizona, which Trump won handily in 2016.
The former president issued a statement reaffirming those charges, even as media and Democrat officials collude to gaslight the public at large and to project their own offenses onto Trump supporters.
“The Fake News Media, working in close conjunction with Big Tech and the Radical Left Democrats, is doing everything they can to perpetuate the term ‘The Big Lie‘ when speaking of 2020 Presidential Election Fraud,” Trump said in the statement.
“They are right in that the 2020 Presidential Election was a Big Lie, but not in the way they mean,” he continued. “The 2020 Election, which didn’t even have Legislative approvals from many States (which is required under the U.S. Constitution), and was also otherwise corrupt, was indeed The Big Lie.”
Hobbs, who has led many of the failed court challenges to obstruct the audit, on Wednesday sent a letter to the Senate’s liaison to its recount contractor, former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, formally laying out a series of problems she saw with the policies.
“Mr. Bennett, as a former Secretary of State, you know that our elections are governed by a complex framework of laws and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security, and transparency,” Hobbs wrote. “You also must therefore know that the procedures governing this audit ensure none of those things.”
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Amid all the distractions from the Left, including media presence in the facility, the work of completing the audit has been slow. Bennett told the Associated Press Tuesday night that teams doing a hand recount has tallied less than 10% of the ballots since starting on April 23.
Bennett said it is clear the count can’t be done by the time the deal allowing the Senate to use the Coliseum ends on May 14. Several days of high school graduations are set to begin on May 15.
Bennett said the plan was to move the ballots and other materials into a secure area of the Coliseum to allow the events, then restart counting and continue until that is completed.
That seems far from certain, though, after a state fair board official told the Arizona Republic that extending the Coliseum lease is “not feasible.” The fair board didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from the AP.
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