The GOP local government of Maricopa County, Arizona is denouncing the state GOP's "audit" of the 2020 election results as a "grift" and the only question is how quickly the county's local Board of Supervisors is removed, replaced, and charged with election fraud by The Big Liars.
The Republican leaders of Arizona’s most populous county issued a blistering rebuke on Monday to a review of the November election that had been ordered by Republicans in the State Senate, calling it “a grift disguised as an audit” that had spun out of the legislators’ control.
The senior Republican in Maricopa County, Jack Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said flatly that the county would stop cooperating with the review and suggested that it would challenge in court any of its conclusions that pointed toward improprieties.
“This board is done explaining anything,” Mr. Sellers said at a special meeting of the five-member board, four of whose members are Republicans. “People’s ballots and money are not make-believe. It’s time to be done with this craziness, and get on with this county’s critical business.”
It was an extraordinary pushback to an election review that was supposed to placate voters who insisted that Donald J. Trump’s narrow loss in the state was a result of fraud, but which has mushroomed into a political spectacle with what experts call serious procedural lapses.
The Maricopa supervisors had resisted the audit since its inception in December, asking a court to decide whether the State Senate could legally take control of election records and equipment governed by strict security safeguards. They had insisted throughout that the county’s election — in which Joseph R. Biden Jr. earned a slim majority of 2.1 million total votes — had been among the most secure and smooth in the state’s history.
But they were pushed past the breaking point by a letter last week from State Senator Karen Fann, the Senate president, that implied that someone in the county had illegally removed critical election files from equipment and software that the Senate had subpoenaed for examination.
The supervisors learned of the claim when it was posted on a Twitter feed controlled by the review team. Ms. Fann’s letter asked the supervisors to address that and other concerns in a meeting with state senators and a liaison to the firms conducting the review — a meeting that was to be livestreamed by the far-right cable channel One America News.
“This board was going to be part of a political theater,” one Republican supervisor and former chairman of the board, Bill Gates, said. “The Arizona Senate is better than that. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is better than that. And I am not going to be a part of that.”
Mr. Trump had seized on the deleted-file claim over the weekend, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities in the vote. That led the county’s top election official, Stephen Richer, to call Mr. Trump’s online comment “unhinged.”
Of course the Maricopa County GOP government was going to be sacrificed on the altar of the Big Lie, and everyone knows it. It's just a matter of time before state lawmakers move against the county. Arizona allows for both impeachment and recall ballots against any elected or appointed government official, and I fully expect one or both to happen to the County Board of Directors, County Recorder Steve Richter, and the state's only Democratic statewide officeholder, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.
I will be shocked if that doesn't get underway by July 4th. Republicans after all have to now justify the Big Lie between now and November 2022, and that means covering their asses.
Top House Republican Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday he opposes a bill to form a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, raising doubts about its passage in Congress.
The chamber plans to vote this week on legislation to set up a 10-member panel — appointed by Democratic and Republican leaders — which would study the events that led to a pro-Trump mob overrunning the Capitol while lawmakers confirmed President Joe Biden’s electoral win. Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and John Katko, R-N.Y., the chair and ranking members of the House Homeland Security Committee, brokered the agreement.
McCarthy, who voted to object to counting Arizona and Pennsylvania’s certified election results after rioters stormed the Capitol, criticized the process of setting up the commission as political. He contended the panel would duplicate efforts by congressional committees and federal authorities to investigate the insurrection, and argued its scope should extend beyond the events of Jan. 6.
“Given the political misdirections that have marred this process, given the now duplicative and potentially counterproductive nature of this effort, and given the Speaker’s shortsighted scope that does not examine interrelated forms of political violence in America, I cannot support this legislation,” he said in a statement.
By "interrelated forms of political violence" McCarthy means rounding up Black Lives Matter as "insurrectionists" too.
Understand that the GOP will not allow any investigation of January 6th and the Big Lie move forward unless it does as much or more damage to the Democratic party. Meanwhile, they'll spend the whole time complaining that the "corrupt media and corrupt Democrats" won't let the Big Lie go.
Watch.
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