Rudy Giuliani, attorney for President Donald Trump, meets with some Arizona Republicans Monday at a Phoenix hotel.
Trump supporters have session at Phoenix hotel
President Trump’s personal lawyer spent many hours with a handful of Republican Arizona lawmakers at a downtown Phoenix hotel Monday discussing concerns with the 2020 election. Across town, as the meeting wore on, state officials officially certified the results showing the president lost.
Rudy Giuliani and state lawmakers billed the meeting as a “hearing,” but it was not an official legislative event.
Outside the Hyatt Regency, several hundred Trump supporters filled Second Street between Adams and Monroe, where they waved flags, chanted, sold hats and other Trump merchandise, and showed their support for the president.
Downtown Phoenix was otherwise eerily quiet, as it has been for most of the pandemic.
Large screens set up outside the Hyatt lobby broadcast the hearing taking place inside, which some people watched. Others stood on a painter’s ladder and used a microphone and gave rallying presentations, alleging fraud in the election, human trafficking cover-ups by Democrats, and denouncing the McCain family. Several carried firearms. Few wore masks.
Inside the hotel ballroom, Republican lawmakers Mark Finchem, Bret Roberts, Nancy Barto, Leo Biasiucci, David Cook, Kelly Townsend, David Gowan, Sonny Borrelli and Sylvia Allen listened to “witnesses” — who were not placed under oath — as they explained why they thought Arizona’s election results were possibly compromised.
They listened to theories on how elections can be infiltrated.
Neither the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives nor president of the state Senate were there. Republican congressmen Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs attended, sitting behind Giuliani.
Problems with numbers, facts
“We’re told many times, over and
over again, ad nauseum, throughout election campaigns that your vote counts,” Barto, R-Phoenix, said. “‘Get out and vote. Your vote counts. Does it? Arizonans want to know. And that’s why we’re here, to listen to evidence and testimony and answer that question, wherever it leads. We need to restore confidence in our election system.”
The goal of the Trump team’s effort seems to be to persuade Arizona’s Legislature to intercede with the state’s election results, which is not possible under current state law.
“You’re the last step to make sure that this election is not corrupted,” Trump attorney Jenna Ellis told lawmakers: “You’re the last step to make sure that this election is not corrupted. Again, we aren’t asking you to step in and overturn an election. We are asking you to step in to make sure that the corruption that occurred here does not stand.”
Giuliani spoke at length about how the Democratic Party was “corrupted.” He said he assumes Arizonans had no idea a Canadian company provided our voting machines.
“I don’t know who makes the choice in your state of who should be counting your votes. But I know that person either is exceedingly naïve or much worse,” Giuliani said, without providing evidence that the state’s voting machines were manipulated.
In one exchange with Townsend and Cook, Giuliani asked how many noncitizens voted in the election, and suggested Arizona, which has a total population of 7.3 million, had 5 million “illegal aliens” living in the state.
“Let’s say there were 5 million illegal aliens in Arizona. It is beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn’t vote,” Giuliani said
Gosar, sitting directly behind Giuliani, had no visible reaction to the assertion that more than 70% of people living in Arizona are not legal citizens. And none of the state lawmakers in the exchange with Giuliani corrected the figure.
During a later exchange regarding noncitizens voting, Giuliani suggested Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, was ignoring the issue. Ducey has repeatedly defended the integrity of Arizona’s elections.
“It seems like the governor and the secretary of state just don’t want the facts,” Giuliani said, causing a stir in the ballroom.
Retired Army Col. Phil Waldron served as a key “witness” for Giuliani and lawmakers at the meeting. He served a similar role for the Trump campaign’s efforts to challenge the election results in Pennsylvania.
Waldron said he is an “information warfare officer” and an expert on “how to get in and corrupt these machines to conduct strategic influence operations.”
Waldron said voting machines are “vulnerable everywhere.”
“If there’s software, it can be corrupted, it can be manipulated with a device as small as simple as a USB device, which these machines are booted up and run off of,” he said, offering no evidence that occurred in Arizona.
Waldron also claimed Arizona voting machines were connected to the internet while they were being used, which is inaccurate, and suggested equipment could be manipulated to pick winners.
He presented an anonymous email purportedly from a Pima County resident regarding a plan by Democrats to “embed votes” in an equal distribution across counties, which he said could be dismissed as a minor error if the plan was detected.
He repeatedly — and falsely — suggested that signatures on mail-in ballots are not verified. In fact, Arizona counties verify signatures on ballot envelopes, ensuring the county mailed a ballot to that voter and the signature matches the one on file with the voter registration record.
Late in the day, comments from a woman identified as Judith Burns of Maricopa County seemed to refute this assertion, as she discussed volunteering as a poll observer at the voting center where signatures were verified.
Despite the contradiction to earlier comments that signatures weren’t verified, Giuliani simply pressed on, asking her about how fast the workers verified signatures.
She said she was concerned that many signatures that were labeled by the computer as having “low confidence” as a match were still apparently approved by poll workers.
“I wasn’t sure what to make of all these signatures that did not match and they were being counted.”
Giuliani asked her at one point to describe the verification process, and he incorrectly stated that ballots come sealed in two envelopes. She corrected him that Maricopa County ballots are returned in a single green envelope.
He continued. Even though she was not certain about the process, Giuliani was certain her observations showed fraud.
“Do you realize the enormity of cheating that was going on in front of you?” Giuliani asked Burns.
Burns said she was not sure what signatures were accepted and which were not, or how many questionable ballots she saw accepted. Still, she said she was troubled by what she observed.
“I was truly astounded saw,” Burns said.
The Republican-led Maricopa County Board of Supervisors has repeatedly defended the election process and unanimously certified the election results.
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Trump: Lawmakers ‘legend for taking this on’
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Another person who acted as a “witness” for lawmakers was Oro Valley resident Anna Orth, who volunteered as a poll observer and poll worker this year.
Among her concerns was that not enough Republicans served as observers at the precinct where she worked. She also had concerns that the box of ballots was not guarded by a police officer when she dropped off her own ballot.
She said she asked the poll worker that day who would ensure nobody stole the box containing her ballot, and the workers said they would. She was concerned because the woman appeared to be about 85 years old, Orth said.
“She looked fragile. I don’t know how that could be protected,” Orth said. “It did make it in because when I checked my ballot, it was counted. But another question is, how do we know who we voted for ... . I don’t know if my ballot actually has the people that I voted for.”
Late in the day, another woman was discussing her experience at the polls when Giuliani interrupted her to allow President Trump to address the room through a phone call.
“This is the greatest scam ever perpetrated upon our country,” Trump said before criticizing Ducey for certifying the election results and praising the lawmakers conducting the meeting.
“They are becoming legend for taking this on,” Trump said.