Presidential Election of 2020

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      Arizona Senators Retract Claims of Deleted 2020 Presidential Election Files

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      A political firestorm erupted in Arizona this week after Republican-backed reviewers of the November election in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, suggested that someone had deleted a crucial data file from election equipment that had been subpoenaed as part of the inquiry.The county’s chief official, himself a Republican, called the charge outrageous. Former President Donald J. Trump, who has promoted the lie that the Arizona vote was rigged against him, boasted that the allegation was “devastating” evidence of irregularities.But on Tuesday, a contractor for the Republican-controlled State Senate, which is conducting the review, said the claim had become “a moot point.” The file had been found on a set of four computer drives in the election equipment, the contractor, Ben Cotton, said at a meeting on the review convened by Republican senators.Mr. Cotton’s effort to downplay the brouhaha fit the theme of the livestreamed meeting, in which the senators sought to cast the widely ridiculed review as a civics-lesson effort to improve election administration, not a bid to placate angry Trump supporters who refuse to accept his loss in the state.“I’ve said from the get-go that I’m relatively sure we are not going to find anything of any magnitude that would imply any intentional wrongdoing,” the president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, said at the session. Rather, she said, the review is expected to highlight that “we could do a little better job with the chain of custody” of voting material and other technical aspects of conducting an election.The review has nonetheless acquired a markedly partisan tilt, with senators employing a firm whose chief executive has spread conspiracy theories of an Arizona election stolen from Mr. Trump, and granting One America News and pro-Trump figures broad access to the process.Among the ardent set of believers that Mr. Trump actually won the November election, the notion that the Arizona review will demolish all evidence of President Biden’s victory has become an article of faith.Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, denounced the review on Monday as “a grift disguised as an audit.” Other Republicans in the county government have urged the State Senate to scrap the inquiry, saying it was an effort to undermine the November election and with it, Arizonans’ faith in democracy.In the meeting on Tuesday, Ms. Fann and another supporter of the review, State Senator Warren Petersen, largely ignored such criticisms, while expressing frustration that county officials had decided not to cooperate with their inquiry.The 70-minute session raised minor questions about the November election, such as a purported mismatch between some ballots that had been damaged at polling places and the duplicate ballots that were used to record those votes. But it made no broad claims of irregularities.Mr. Cotton, the founder of a data security firm in Ashburn, Va., called CyFIR, maintained that the data file at the center of the latest dispute over the audit had indeed been deleted from election equipment hard drives. But he later indicated that he had been unable to find the file because county election officials had not given him instructions to find it.Senator Petersen, seen by many as the prime supporter of the audit, called Mr. Cotton’s discovery of the supposedly deleted file “good news.” More

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      Leaders Position House G.O.P. Against Independent Accounting for Jan. 6 Riot

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      Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, said he would oppose the independent commission, and urged the party’s rank and file to do the same.WASHINGTON — Top House Republicans urged their colleagues on Tuesday to oppose bipartisan legislation creating an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, positioning their conference against a full accounting of the deadly riot by a pro-Trump mob.Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, announced his opposition in a lengthy statement on Tuesday morning, and his leadership team followed up later to recommend that lawmakers vote “no” on Wednesday. Together, the actions suggested that the House vote would be a mostly partisan affair, highlighting yet again Republicans’ reluctance to grapple with former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies and their determination to deflect attention from the Capitol assault.Mr. McCarthy had been pushing for any outside investigation to include a look at what he called “political violence” on the left, including by anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter, rather than focus narrowly on the actions of Mr. Trump and his supporters who carried out the riot.“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,” Mr. McCarthy said in a statement.His opposition raised questions about the fate of the commission in the Senate, where Democrats would need at least 10 Republicans to agree to support its formation. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said he and other Republican senators were undecided and would “listen to the arguments on whether such a commission is needed.”House Republican leaders had initially suggested that they would allow lawmakers to vote however they saw fit, too. But they abruptly reversed course on Tuesday, releasing a “leadership recommendation” urging a “no” vote in an apparent bid to tamp down on the number of members embracing the bill.Mr. Trump himself put out a statement on Tuesday night calling the commission a “Democrat trap.” He urged Republicans to “get much tougher” and to oppose it unless it was expanded to look at “murders, riots, and fire bombings” in cities run by Democrats.“Hopefully, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are listening!” he said.In rejecting the commission, Mr. McCarthy essentially threw one of his key deputies, Representative John Katko of New York, under the bus in favor of shielding Mr. Trump and the party from further scrutiny. Mr. Katko had negotiated the makeup and scope of the commission with his Democratic counterpart on the Homeland Security Committee and enthusiastically endorsed it on Friday.It was all the more striking coming just days after Mr. McCarthy had maneuvered the ouster from leadership of his No. 3, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, because she refused to drop criticisms of Mr. Trump and Republicans who abetted his election falsehoods. Ms. Cheney has said that the commission should have a narrow scope, and that Mr. McCarthy should testify about a phone call with Mr. Trump during the riot.Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, immediately slammed Republican opposition as “cowardice” and released a letter Mr. McCarthy had sent her in February showing that Democrats had incorporated all three of his principal demands for a commission modeled after the one that studied the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.In it, Mr. McCarthy said he wanted to ensure any commission had an even ratio of appointees by Republicans and Democrats, shared subpoena power between the two parties’ appointees and did not include any “findings or other predetermined conclusions” in its organizing documents.Democrats ultimately agreed to all three, but in his statement on Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy said Ms. Pelosi had “refused to negotiate in good faith.”“I presume Trump doesn’t want this to happen,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader. “Enough said.”Mr. Katko predicted a “healthy” number of Republicans would still vote for it.“I can’t state this plainly enough: This is about facts,” Mr. Katko told the House Rules Committee at a hearing on the bill. “It’s not about partisan politics.”But by encouraging Republicans to vote no, Mr. McCarthy positioned the commission as yet another test of loyalty to Mr. Trump, spotlighting a rift within the party between a small minority that is willing to question him and the vast majority that is not.Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, vowed to press the issue with Senate Republicans by quickly bringing the legislation up for a vote in that chamber.“Republicans can let their constituents know: Are they on the side of truth?” Mr. Schumer said. “Or do they want to cover up for the insurrectionists and Donald Trump?”Mr. McCarthy’s biggest complaint was the panel’s narrow focus on the riot itself — carried out by right-wing activists inspired by Mr. Trump — when he said it should take a broader look at political violence on the left, including a shooting by a left-leaning activist who targeted congressional Republicans at a baseball practice four years ago.Some Republicans have gone much further in recent weeks, trying to whitewash the violence on Jan. 6 that left five people dead, injured 140 police officers and endangered lawmakers’ lives along with that of Vice President Mike Pence.In remarks on the House floor on Tuesday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said a commission was needed to study “all the riots that happened during the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd,” not the attack on the Capitol. She also accused the Justice Department of mistreating those charged in connection with the attack.“While it’s catch and release for domestic terrorists, antifa, B.L.M., the people who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6 are being abused,” she said.Catie Edmondson More

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      Michigan Judge Dismisses Suit Questioning 2020 Election Result

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      A Michigan state judge on Tuesday dismissed one of the last, high-profile court cases questioning the results of the 2020 presidential election, a case former President Donald J. Trump cited to claim fraud after unofficial results in one county initially assigned some votes for him to President Biden.The plaintiff, William Bailey, a local resident, and his lawyer, Matthew S. DePerno, had sought to use the case to cast doubt on the vote nationwide, suggesting that a flawed count by Dominion Voting System machines in Antrim County, Mich., meant that all such machines were open to manipulation and deliberate fraud. The suit was also an attempt to force another statewide audit.Although Mr. DePerno and the various experts he tapped to analyze the vote repeatedly said that various flaws with the voting machines left them open to hacking, they did not cite any specific evidence that it had occurred. A computer expert hired by the state also noted some security weaknesses, but said there was no indication that they had been exploited.Mr. Trump cited Antrim County in his speech on Jan. 6 in Washington claiming that the vote was corrupt and has continued to site the case as an example of “major” fraud. The critical mistake made by local election officials was readily evident right after the Nov. 3 vote. Unofficial results posted online by the county clerk indicated that Mr. Biden won the heavily Republican country with 7,769 votes versus 4,509 votes for Mr. Trump.A quick analysis by county and state election officials determined that the mistake was because of human error — a failure to update the software in some voting machines to account for new ballot lines for local issues had thrown the machine count off, with votes for Mr. Trump attributed to Mr. Biden.After several attempts at correcting the count using paper ballots, including a hand recount released last December, the numbers basically flipped, with Mr. Trump outpolling Mr. Biden by more than 3,000 votes in Antrim County. Mr. Trump lost Michigan by some 154,000 votes.Judge Kevin A. Elsenheimer of the 13th Circuit Court, a former Republican legislator in Michigan, granted the motion on Tuesday by the combined state and county legal team for a summary dismissal on fairly narrow technical grounds, saying the legal requirement for voters to request an audit had already been met.The statewide vote audit demanded by Mr. Bailey and his lawyer had already been completed by Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, earlier in the year, he said. The ruling did not address the issue of possible manipulation.Ms. Benson had said two audits confirmed the accuracy and integrity of the vote, with a random sample of ballots in the second one mirroring the machine count.In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Benson said that the dismissal of the “last of the lawsuits” seeking to further the “big lie” confirmed that the election was fair and secure.Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, said in a statement that she hoped the ruling would be a “nail in the coffin” for any remaining conspiracy theories surrounding the outcome of the presidential election.Mr. DePerno did not respond to a telephone call and an email seeking comment, but he is expected to appeal. The case continues to roil the waters in Antrim County, with public discussion of it taking up many hours of recent county commission meetings. Democrats have generally expressed support for the county’s explanation while Republicans demand the county clerk, a Republican, be dismissed.County officials have fretted aloud that they would have to replace all the voting machines because a significant number of voters had lost faith in them, and at their last meeting in early May decided to summon their lawyer for a briefing.“Is everybody OK with just a quick update and not 8,700 questions for four hours?” pleaded Terry VanAlstine, the chairman of the board of commissioners. More

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      Jim Klobuchar Dies at 93; Minnesota Newspaperman and Amy’s Father

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      He rose to folk hero status with his derring-do as a journalist and came to national attention when his daughter, Senator Amy Klobuchar, spoke openly about his struggles with alcoholism.Jim Klobuchar was a renowned sportswriter and general interest columnist in Minnesota for decades.Straight out of central casting, he was celebrated for his derring-do: He once held a piece of chalk between his lips while a sharpshooter took aim at it. He was a finalist for NASA’s initiative to send a journalist into space, until the Challenger explosion in 1986 ended the program. He scaled the Matterhorn eight times and Kilimanjaro five.And he could make readers weep, as when he wrote about a 5-year-old girl with a brain tumor who loved to ride the rails: “She was cradled in her mother’s lap on the observation car of the Milwaukee Road’s Hiawatha, a tidy young lady. A dying little girl, taking her last train ride.”But he did not come to national attention until 2018, when his daughter, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, mentioned him during the contentious televised hearings on Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.During her questioning of the nominee, Ms. Klobuchar noted that her father, then 90, was a recovering alcoholic who still attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. She asked Judge Kavanaugh whether he had ever drunk so much that he could not recollect events. He turned the question back on her, a breach of decorum for which he later apologized. She accepted the apology, adding, “When you have a parent that’s an alcoholic, you’re pretty careful about drinking.”By then her father had been sober for more than 25 years. When she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Senator Klobuchar spoke often of his successful treatment and proposed spending billions of dollars to treat substance abuse.Mr. Klobuchar in 1974 at his desk at The Minneapolis Star, where we wrote a long-running column about whatever he wanted.Star Tribune, via Getty ImagesMr. Klobuchar died on Wednesday at a care facility in Burnsville, a suburb of the Twin Cities. He was 93. Senator Klobuchar, who announced his death on Twitter, did not specify a cause but said he had had Alzheimer’s disease. He survived a bout with Covid-19 last year.Mr. Klobuchar was long popular in Minnesota, even a folk hero. In addition to his newspaper columns — 8,400 of them by the time he retired from The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1995 — he wrote 23 books, held a football clinic for women, hosted talk shows and for almost four decades led annual “Jaunt with Jim” bicycling trips around the state, stopping at pay phones along the road to call in and dictate his column. After he and his first wife, Rose (Heuberger) Klobuchar, divorced in 1976, he and Amy began taking long-distance biking trips to bond with each other.As a young journalist for The Associated Press, he experienced an especially heady moment the day after the 1960 presidential election, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were still neck and neck, with three states yet to report results. Mr. Klobuchar wrote the nationwide bulletin announcing that Mr. Kennedy had won Minnesota, giving him enough electoral votes to clinch the presidency. The scoop appeared in papers across the country.James John Klobuchar was born on April 9, 1928, in Ely, a small city on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, where he grew up. His father, Michael Klobuchar, worked in the iron ore mines. His mother, Mary (Pucel) Klobuchar, was a homemaker.From an early age, Jim read The Duluth Herald, and his mother encouraged him to pursue a career in journalism, Senator Klobuchar wrote in her 2015 memoir, “The Senator Next Door.”He graduated from Ely Junior College (now Vermilion Community College) in 1948, then enrolled at the University of Minnesota, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1950.He landed a job as wire editor at The Bismarck Daily Tribune. But six months later he was drafted into the Army and assigned to a new psychological warfare unit in Stuttgart, Germany, where he wrote anti-communist material.He returned briefly to the Bismarck paper, then was recruited by The Associated Press in Minneapolis, where he scored his election scoop. He joined The Minneapolis Tribune in 1961 as a sports reporter, focusing on the Minnesota Vikings.He left The Tribune in 1965 for the competing St. Paul Pioneer Press, but it wasn’t long before The Minneapolis Star lured him away by giving him a column to write about whatever he wanted.Mr. Klobuchar in 2015. He came to national attention when Senator Klobuchar spoke publicly of his overcoming alcohol addiction.Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune, via Associated PressThis was the heyday of print journalism, when newspapers sent their star writers all over the world. During the height of the Cold War, Mr. Klobuchar reported from Moscow. He covered the murder and funeral of Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister, in 1978. He challenged the pool hustler Minnesota Fats to a game. He wrote about an air service that employed topless flight attendants. He played a reporter in the 1974 movie “The Wrestler,” with Ed Asner.But it was not all smooth sailing. He was suspended twice, once for writing a speech for a politician, and once for making up a quote in a story that he thought was an obvious satire.He also took his drinking too far, his daughter said in her book. For a time, heavy drinking was part of his colorful public persona. When he was charged with a couple of alcohol-related driving offenses in the mid-1970s, nothing much happened.But the public’s attitude toward drinking and driving underwent a sea change, and when he was arrested in 1993 for driving under the influence, he lost his license and was threatened with jail. He wrote a front-page apology to his readers. And in an accompanying note, the paper’s editor, Tim McGuire, said that Mr. Klobuchar had “endangered lives” and that the paper was insisting that he seek treatment.He complied. He entered an inpatient rehabilitation center, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and found God. Ms. Klobuchar wrote that his readers forgave him.“It was his very flaws that made my dad so appealing to them,” she said. “His rough-and-tumble life growing up and his personal struggles had a huge influence on his writing. That’s why he was at his best when he wrote about what he called ‘the heroes among us’ — ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”In addition to Senator Klobuchar, he is survived by another daughter, Meagan; his wife, Susan Wilkes; his brother, Dick; and a granddaughter.When he decided to retire from The Star Tribune in 1995, Mr. Klobuchar told his office mates that he wanted no fuss, just to leave quietly. After he had packed up his things and was headed for the door, an editor got on the public-address system and announced: “This is Jim Klobuchar’s last day. That’s 43 years of journalism going out the door.”Everyone stood and applauded. More

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      The Spectacle of the G.O.P.’s Shrinking Tent

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      On May 12, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, from her leadership post. Her transgression? Vocally rebuking the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.But Cheney’s ouster is just the latest plot development in a story about the contemporary G.O.P. that goes back farther than Nov. 3, 2020, and even Nov. 8, 2016. Over the past decade, the party has decimated its former leadership class. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were pushed out. Eric Cantor lost in the primaries. George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and John McCain were viciously attacked by Donald Trump and his supporters. Cheney is just the latest victim of this ongoing party purge, and she certainly won’t be the last.So how did the Republican Party get here? And what does that tell us about its future — and the future of American democracy?Nicole Hemmer is the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and a host of the podcasts “Past/Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” A political historian by training, she has followed the development of the contemporary Republican Party as closely as anyone, with specific attention to the role right-wing media has played in the party’s development.We discuss how Republican Party loyalty has morphed into unwavering fealty to Donald Trump; whether the G.O.P. is a postpolicy party; the vicious feedback loop between the G.O.P. base, right-wing media and Republican politicians; how the party of Lincoln became a party committed to minority rule; Hemmer’s grim outlook on what the current G.O.P.’s behavior will mean for the future of American democracy; and much more.(You can listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. A full transcript of the episode will be available midday.)Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Amber Lautigar Reichert“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristin Lin. More

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      Giuliani Seeks to Block Review of Evidence From His Phones

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      Prosecutors investigating Rudolph W. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine have seized his electronic devices, a move his lawyers are now questioning.Rudolph W. Giuliani on Monday opened a broad attack on the searches that federal investigators conducted of his home, his office and his iCloud account, asking a judge to block any review of the seized records while his lawyers determine whether there was a legitimate basis for the warrants, according a court filing made public on Monday.Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers are seeking copies of the confidential government documents that detail the basis for the search warrants, a legal long shot that they hope could open the door for them to argue for the evidence to be suppressed. Typically, prosecutors only disclose such records after someone is indicted and before a trial, but Mr. Giuliani, who is under investigation for potential lobbying violations, has not been accused of wrongdoing.A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on Monday.In a 17-page letter to the judge who authorized the searches, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers argued that it would have been more appropriate — and less invasive — for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to seek information through a subpoena, which, unlike a warrant, would have given him an opportunity to review the documents and respond.Justice Department policy recommends that prosecutors use subpoenas when seeking information from lawyers, unless there is a concern about destruction of evidence.The defense lawyers wrote that prosecutors “simply chose to treat a distinguished lawyer as if he was the head of a drug cartel or a terrorist, in order to create maximum prejudicial coverage of both Giuliani and his most well-known client — the former president of the United States.”The lawyers also disclosed that the government had claimed in a November 2019 search warrant for Mr. Giuliani’s iCloud account that the search needed to be a secret because of concerns he might destroy records or intimidate witnesses.Though the government routinely cites concern about potential destruction of records when seeking search warrants, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers attacked the idea that their client, himself a former federal prosecutor and onetime personal lawyer to President Donald J. Trump, would ever destroy evidence.“Such an allegation, on its face, strains credulity,” the lawyers, including Robert J. Costello and Arthur Aidala, wrote. “It is not only false, but extremely damaging to Giuliani’s reputation. It is not supported by any credible facts and is contradicted by Giuliani’s efforts to provide information to the government.”The judge who approved the warrants, J. Paul Oetken of Federal District Court, will ultimately decide whether Mr. Giuliani will have access to the confidential government materials underlying them.Mr. Giuliani’s court filing came in response to the government’s request that Judge Oetken appoint a so-called special master to review cellphones and computers seized in the search of Mr. Giuliani’s home and office in Manhattan on April 28.The special master — usually a retired judge or magistrate — would determine whether the materials contained in the devices are covered by attorney-client privilege and as a result cannot be used as evidence in the case. He or she would filter out privileged communications not only between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump, but also between Mr. Giuliani and his other clients.Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers called the appointment of a special master “premature,” because they are first seeking copies of the search warrant materials.The authorities want to examine the electronic devices for communications that might reveal whether Mr. Giuliani violated lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine, The New York Times has reported.While serving as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer before the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Giuliani sought to uncover damaging information on President Biden, then a leading Democratic contender.At issue is whether Mr. Giuliani was at the same time lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials who were assisting him in the search.It is a violation of federal law to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign officials without registering with the Justice Department. Mr. Giuliani never registered as a lobbyist for the Ukrainians. He has maintained that he was working only for Mr. Trump.One day after the search, the U.S. attorney’s office told Judge Oetken in a letter that the F.B.I. had begun to extract materials from the seized devices but had not yet begun reviewing them.In the letter, the prosecutors said the appointment of a special master might be appropriate because of “the unusually sensitive privilege issues” raised by the searches, citing, for example, Mr. Giuliani’s representation of Mr. Trump.Communications between lawyers and their clients are generally shielded from investigators in the United States, and communications between presidents and their aides enjoy a similar protection, known as executive privilege.“Any search may implicate not only the attorney-client privilege but the executive privilege,” the office of Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, wrote.In seeking the appointment of a special master to review Mr. Giuliani’s materials, the prosecutors cited their office’s investigation of Michael D. Cohen, another of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers.In that case, federal agents seized documents and electronic devices in an April 2018 search of Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room. A judge appointed Barbara S. Jones, a retired judge, to determine whether those materials were off-limits to investigators because of attorney-client privilege.Ms. Jones ultimately concluded that only a fraction of Mr. Cohen’s materials were privileged and that the rest could be provided to the government. That August, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes. More

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      ‘We Can’t Indulge These Insane Lies’: Arizona G.O.P. Split on Vote Audit

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      Top local Republicans are hitting back at Donald J. Trump and fellow party members in the State Senate over a review of Arizona ballots.For weeks, election professionals and Democrats have consistently called the Republican-backed review of November voting results in Arizona a fatally flawed exercise, marred by its partisan cast of characters and sometimes bizarre methodology.Now, after a week in which leaders of the review suggested they had found evidence of illegal behavior, top Republicans in the state’s largest county have escalated their own attacks on the effort, with the county’s top election official calling former President Donald J. Trump “unhinged” for his online comments falsely accusing the county of deleting an elections database.“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” the official, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican, wrote on Twitter. “As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”Three times, the county has investigated and upheld the integrity of the November vote, which was supervised by Mr. Richer’s predecessor, a Democrat.It is not the first time Republicans in county government have been at odds with the Republicans in the Legislature over the review of the vote. But Mr. Richer is among various Republicans in Maricopa County sounding like they have run out of patience.The five elected supervisors, all but one of whom are Republicans, plan to meet on Monday afternoon to issue a broadside against what Republican sponsors in the State Senate have billed as an election audit, which targets the 2.1 million votes cast in November in metropolitan Phoenix and outlying areas. The planned meeting follows a weekend barrage of posts on Twitter, with the hashtag #RealAuditorsDont, in which the supervisors assailed the integrity of the review.Those posts followed a letter from the leader of the audit, State Senator Karen Fann, implying that the county had removed “the main database for all election-related data” from election equipment that had been subpoenaed for review. Mr. Trump later published the letter on his website, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities.The supervisors’ Twitter rebuke was scathing. Real auditors don’t “release false ‘conclusions’ without understanding what they are looking at,” one post said, ridiculing the allegation of a deleted database. Nor do real auditors “hire known conspiracy theorists,” a reference to the firm hired to manage the review, whose chief executive has promoted theories that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s loss in Arizona.The Arizona Senate president, Karen Fann, has defended the ballot review. Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressJack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, issued a statement calling the suggestion that files were deleted “outrageous, completely baseless and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate,” which ordered the audit. In an interview, he said the meeting on Monday would refute claims in the letter from Ms. Fann, the Senate president.“Basically, every one of our five supervisors said, ‘Enough is enough,’” Mr. Sellers said in an interview on Sunday. “What they’re suggesting is not just criticism. They’re saying we broke the law. And we certainly did not.”The real target of the accusations, he said in the interview, “are the professionals who run the elections, people who followed the rules and who did an incredible job in the middle of a pandemic.“A lot of the questions being asked right now have been answered,” he said of those challenging the November results. “But the people asking them don’t like the answers, so they keep on asking.”At issue is the Maricopa County vote. But Ms. Fann’s letter raises the prospect that an exercise dismissed by serious observers as transparently partisan and flawed could become a potent weapon in the continuing effort by Mr. Trump and his followers to undermine the legitimacy of the vote in Arizona, and perhaps elsewhere.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.One poll by High Ground, a Phoenix firm well known for its political surveys, concluded this spring that 78 percent of Arizona Republicans believe Mr. Trump’s false claims that President Biden did not win the November election. A recent Monmouth University poll found that almost two-thirds of Republicans nationally believe that Mr. Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. More than six in 10 Americans overall believe that he did.Beyond the dispute over supposedly deleted files, Ms. Fann is also pressing the county and the manufacturer of its voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, to release passwords for vote tabulating machines and county-operated internet routers.Dominion, which has been fighting a series of election-fraud conspiracy theories promoted by Trump supporters and pro-Trump news outlets, has said it will cooperate with federally certified election auditors. But it has spurned the firms hired to conduct the Arizona vote review, whose track record in election audits is scant at best.Maricopa County officials have refused to turn over router passwords, which the auditors say they need to determine whether voting machines were connected to the internet and subject to hacking. County officials say past audits have settled that question. The county sheriff, Paul Penzone, called the demand for passwords “mind-numbingly reckless,” saying it would compromise law enforcement operations unrelated to the election.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe election review was born in December as an effort by Republican senators to placate voters who had embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that Mr. Biden’s 10,457-vote victory in the state was a fraud. Maricopa County, where two-thirds of the state’s votes were cast, was chosen in part because Republicans refused to believe that Mr. Biden had scored a 45,000-vote victory in a county that once was solid G.O.P. territory.What once seemed an effort to mollify angry supporters of Mr. Trump, however, has become engulfed in acrimony as Ms. Fann and other senators have steered the review in a decidedly partisan direction, hiring as its manager a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had previously suggested that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s Arizona loss.An accounting of the review’s finances remains cloudy, but far-right supporters, including the ardently pro-Trump cable news outlet One America News, have raised funds on its behalf. Nonpartisan election experts and the Justice Department have cited troubling indicators that the review is open to manipulation and ignores the most basic security guidelines.Most Arizona Republican officials who have spoken publicly have doggedly supported the review. But State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from a suburban Phoenix district evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, made headlines last week after saying that the conduct of the review made him embarrassed to serve in the State Senate.Senator T.J. Shope, another Republican from a Phoenix swing district, has been more circumspect, saying he believed Mr. Biden’s election was legitimate but that he had been too busy to follow the controversy. But in a Twitter post on Saturday, he wrote that Mr. Trump was “peddling in fantasy” by suggesting that the county’s election records had been nefariously deleted.The Maricopa County vote review has been forced to suspend operations this week while the Phoenix work site, a suburban coliseum, is cleared out to host high school graduations. Mr. Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said he hoped the supervisors’ effort to refute the review’s claims on Monday would be the end of the affair.“It’s clearer by the day: The people hired by the Senate are in way over their heads,” his statement said. “This is not funny; it’s dangerous.” More