Thread by @weareoversight

NEW: Records we obtained from December 2020 show contact Arizona legislators had with Donald Trump’s legal team and conspiracy theorists who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
americanoversight.org/december-2020-…

On Dec. 8, 2020, Phil Waldron — the retired U.S. Army colonel who pushed baseless voter-fraud claims and helped circulate a plan to challenge the 2020 election — emailed Arizona lawmakers with a proposal for eliminating some ballots from the vote totals.
rollingstone.com/politics/polit…

Waldron also included Jenna Ellis (a lawyer on Trump’s legal team who helped file lawsuits seeking to overturn the election) and Bernard Kerik (an associate of Rudy Giuliani), and Katherine Friess (another attorney connected to the efforts to overturn the election results).

On Dec. 11, Waldron sent an email titled “Background Information on Rapid Ballot Validation” to state Rep. Mark Finchem, state Sens. Eddie Farnsworth and Sonny Borrelli, and election conspiracy theorist Jovan Hutton Pulitzer.

The email and its attachments laid out a more detailed plan for assessing the ballots cast in Maricopa County for “fraudulent activity” — many of which would later find their way into Arizona’s widely discredited “audit.”

These emails are significant for two reasons: First, they show connections between Trump’s legal team and Arizona lawmakers in the weeks after the 2020 election regarding a plan to change the outcome of the vote.

Second, they provide further evidence that the goal of Arizona’s “audit” was rooted in an effort to overturn the election and find evidence for the Trump campaign’s false claims of fraud.

Less than a week after receiving the Dec. 11 email, one of the recipients, Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, co-signed the first subpoenas demanding that Maricopa County turn over its ballots to the Senate for review.
azmirror.com/2020/12/15/sen…

And as we know from earlier emails we obtained, later that same month, Sen. President Karen Fann boasted that she’d received a call from Trump himself thanking her for pushing to prove any fraud.

These are just the latest records we’ve obtained in our ongoing investigation into the Arizona “audit.” Learn more here:
americanoversight.org/investigation/…