Ariz. Senate president shouldn’t be allowed to keep audit secrets
Just when you think Senate President Karen Fann and her silly election audit could not look any more foolish ...
... Along comes a report that her “independent” auditor, Doug Logan, was working with Donald Trump’s legal team to overturn the 2020 election results in several swing states.
This, even as Fann was hiring him to conduct a supposedly independent audit of Maricopa County’s election results.
Now Fann’s auditor is under criminal investigation, accused of illegally breaking into voting machines in Michigan in April 2021 as part of a plot to prove the election was rigged.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports newly released surveillance footage from January 2021 shows him walking with other Trump allies into a rural Georgia elections office, site of another breach of elections equipment.
And we, as usual, are left in the dark, mystified as to how this character wound up in Veterans Memorial Coliseum, spinning our UV-lighted 5G photographed ballots into a false narrative that something nefarious happened here.
There is a way to bring some light to the question. But it would require Arizona’s judges to show some backbone.
Fann hired Logan to conduct the Maricopa County audit in March 2021, and it took about five minutes for eyebrows to start reaching for the stars.
How, we all wondered, does a Trump supporter with no elections experience – one who was working to overturn the election – get hired to conduct an “unbiased, independent” audit of Maricopa County’s vote?
Why was he Fann’s choice to conduct a $150,000 audit that has thus far cost taxpayers $5 million?
An auditor who, we now know, is facing criminal investigation elsewhere for his post-elections activity.
Fann, as usual, pulled out her wellused clueless card after Tuesday’s Washington Post revelation that Logan could be tied into a second criminal investigation in Georgia.
The thankfully soon-to-retire Senate president told The Arizona Republic’s Robert Anglen on Tuesday that she couldn’t recall how she came to hire Logan and she couldn’t name any of the references he used to get the job.
And, of course, she said she didn’t have any clue about his possibly shady work in other states.
But she had to know that Logan had been busy for months using his ninja skills to support Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen.
By the time of his hiring in Arizona, Logan had repeatedly promoted baseless conspiracy theories, including a reference to debunked claims of a Venezuelan-inspired plot to fix the elections using Dominion Voting Systems machinery.
“The parallels between the statistical analysis of Venezuela and this year’s election are astonishing. I’m ashamed about how few republicans are talking about it,” he tweeted in late December 2020.
Heck, this guy was even retweeting the queens of crazy conspiracy theories, GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward and Trump’s “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell. And still Fann hired him.
For nearly 18 months, The Arizona Republic and others have been asking for public records that would shed light on how Fann came to hire an unqualified, blatantly biased Trump supporter to conduct a complex audit of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots.
Fann has spent well over $500,000 on lawyers to block the public from finding out what happened here. She contends that she and her fellow Republican senators are exempt from the Arizona Public Records Law — that they can’t engage in debate about public policy if they’re worried the public might actually find out what they have to say.
After losing a string of battles in lower courts, the Arizona Supreme Court last week ruled that Fann can claim legislative privilege to hide certain auditrelated documents from public view. But to keep those 1,000 emails, texts and other documents private, the Senate needs to provide better explanations to justify why each one needs to remain secret.
We know, from House Speaker Rusty Bowers, that Trump and his allies were putting tremendous pressure on legislative leaders to overturn the results of Arizona’s election. It’s difficult to understand how any of those communications could be considered “privileged.”
Difficult to believe that there is a court that would say we have no right to know if Doug Logan’s hiring was the result of that pressure campaign.
The Supreme Court sent the records case back to Superior Court, along with an order that the Senate to turn over any records that are not protected by legislative privilege.
Does anybody really trust that the documents that should be released – the ones that will, finally, tell us what really happened here – will be released if it’s up to Fann?
The judge should appoint a special master to hightail it over to the Senate to examine those records and determine what should be released. And when the inevitable appeal comes, the Supreme Court should back that judge up.
It’s time now to bring in an actual independent and unbiased expert – you know, the opposite of Fann’s election auditor – so that we can learn what really happened here.
So that we can find out what Fann has been working so hard to hide.