By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
ANTI-Trump Republicans and Democrats running Maricopa County, Arizona, are acting like clowns at a circus after being caught out by the forensic auditors of the 2020 US general election in the county and being forced to hand over Dominion election equipment for inspection.
The county’s Board of Supervisors, officials and the local sheriff are tripping over their own statements and actions in defending the local election’s alleged narrow win by Biden over Trump. And now Georgia’s Fulton County is in the sights of another forensic audit after a judge gave the process approval.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, went on MSNBC on May 22nd claiming that turning over the election equipment to the Cyber Ninjas electronic auditors could make it “no longer safe for use in future elections”. The situation in Arizona was “nuts and getting nutser” said her interviewer. And then the show switched to “Morning Joe” who went into a ranting meltdown about the audit’s supposed threat to the democratic heart and soul of America.
In a letter to the County Board of Supervisors on May 20th, Ms Hobbs claimed she had “grave concerns” that components of the Dominion Democracy Suite 5:5B (purchased by the county on a three-year, $6.5m lease in 2018) and their chain of custody was compromised because “election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas’ control”.
Her recommendation now, based on “unanimous advice” from the Department of Homeland Security cyber experts and other “election technology and security experts” was that the county not redeploy any of the subpoenaed machines and acquire new ones “to ensure secure and accurate elections in Maricopa County going forward”. Is Ms Hobbs suggesting Dominion machines can be trusted even if serious issues are discovered on the existing ones now being audited?
In an earlier desperate ploy on May 17th, the county officials all got together in front of the media to declare “enough is enough!”. Republican county supervisor Bill Gates fronted up, stating: “I believe that Joe Biden won the election, alright? And the reason I feel confident in saying that, particularly in Maricopa County, is that we overturned every stone, and we have professionals, both with the early voting and the election day voting. They did everything right, we asked the difficult questions, alright, and we certified the election back in November, but now it’s time to say enough is enough.”
There you have it, the county supervisor’s shut and closed case to prove that the Arizona election was as clean as a whistle. CBS News anchors and local journalist Andrew Oxford of The Arizona Republic were also scrambling to find facts to explain why the audit should stop, and they bluffed around as much as they could, pulling pained expressions.
The big media have simply been calling the audit “biased”, “incompetent” and based on a “debunked conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump”. They recently gave uncritical coverage to the contradictory and spurious claims by the county and its sheriff Paul Penzone that handing over an election router threatened the security of citizens’ and law enforcement data. Penzone is hardly an unbiased contributor to the debate since his election campaign was funded to the tune of $2 million by left wing, globalist billionaire George Soros.
But forensic cyber analyst Ben Cotton of CyFIR, contracting for Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm leading the audit, calmly and politely explained the contradictory (and stupid) reasoning behind Hobbs, Penzone and the county’s claims made in a letter at the Arizona State Senate. “The data should not exist on that router – period,” he said. And neither should that election data router even be connected to the internet network where residential and law enforcement data can be accessed, he added.
“There have been public reports by (the county’s previous auditing company) Pro V&V (and) statements by the county that these election systems don’t actually touch the internet, therefore the extension of that would be that they do not touch the county network because that’s exposed to the internet. And to say that the data corresponding to these networks would somehow compromise law enforcement activity or PIA (Privacy Impact Assessment) data seems incongruous to the previous statements.
“And if you take the letter, which states these compromises would occur, at face value, then that means the election data had to be exposed to the internet – which I don’t know is the case or not – but that’s certainly something that we need to explore, given the inconsistencies in these public statements and reports that they have presented.”
The county, with egg all over over their faces, then switched to the insane claim that handing any equipment over to the auditors could actually threaten the integrity of the machinery and it would have to be replaced at a cost of millions of dollars.
The conflicting statements followed the county supervisors and administrators refusing, agreeing and then again refusing to hand over the Dominion Voting Services router. It looked very much like a shabby attempt to hide something. The County Board of Supervisors and staff, like the proverbial naughty children caught in the act, stomped their feet, threatened defamation actions and then refused an invitation to attend the May 23 meeting with the Senate to discuss the issues uncovered so far by the audit.
Senate president Karen Fann’s letter claimed an entire database had been deleted, but this was later corrected to a directory that was found to be deleted but later recovered.
The Senate Republicans are almost entirely pro-Trump, and pushed for a full, forensic audit while the media and court actions by the county repeatedly tried to stop it. Arizona election observers – as with many other locations – reported numerous irregularities in the election conduct at ground level, but the real foul play is suspected to have happened at an electronic level, which is where Cyber Ninjas can do its crucial work.
Far from being “biased and incompetent” the Mr Cotton says CyFIR routinely works with “some of the largest companies in the world with incident response breaches, with forensics matters and we are entrusted with that data and we have never had an exposure, a leak or any type of data being emitted from our custody”. Mr Cotton himself has experience working for government agencies for which security clearance is required.