The Washington Post reports:
Newly released emails sent to and from Arizona state senators reveal that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani reached out personally to urge GOP officials there to move forward with a partisan recount of the 2020 election, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud or other issues.
Hundreds of pages of emails related to the GOP-ordered audit underway in Maricopa County were obtained by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act.
The group published them Friday, along with a scathing statement that decried the audit as a “sham partisan crusade.”
Read the full article.
It has always been clear that the so-called audit in Arizona was a bogus partisan exercise unsupported by fact, but the direct involvement of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani crystallize that this is an anti-democratic power grab. https://t.co/Fx8XvzIjcK
— Noah Bookbinder (@NoahBookbinder) June 5, 2021
NEW Email from AZ Senate President Karen Fann, who authorized election review: “I have the full support of Rudy Giuliani & a personal call from President Trump thanking me for pushing to prove any fraud.” @weareoversight obtained 500+ pages of Fann emails. More to come. pic.twitter.com/qK25hLYsNz
— Brahm Resnik (@brahmresnik) June 4, 2021
NEW: We obtained 507 pages of records related to the Arizona sham audit.
In Dec., as Donald Trump worked to overturn the results of the election, Fann told a constituent that Trump had personally called her to thank her “for pushing to prove any fraud.”https://t.co/1ngGWl0DfX pic.twitter.com/PCUHO64rRT
— American Oversight (@weareoversight) June 4, 2021
Karen Fann, the Republican president of the Arizona Senate, told constituents that then-Pres. Trump had personally called and thanked her for pursuing a controversial review of ballots in Maricopa County, according to emails released by a watchdog group. https://t.co/v9YMRXGbFV
— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 5, 2021