Republicans Snuff Probe of Why and How January 6th Happened

Six Republicans were not enough when ten were needed to prevent a Republican filibuster from putting an end to any commission to investigate the causes of the worst attack on the seat of America’s government in two centuries. In a 54-to-35 vote, Republicans gave license to the rabble to do it again. Eleven senators couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the vote.

Mitch McConnell reportedly worked members of his Republican caucus to vote against the bill as a “personal favor”, as good as saying, “Don’t help the country, help me”.

What a change from the days just after January 6th when Republicans and Democrats alike were horrified by the assault on the Capitol and laid the blame directly on still-President Donald Trump for inciting the mob at his nearby rally. Hadn’t he encouraged the white supremacists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis to come to Washington, telling them, “Big project in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”? Hadn’t he said to them at the rally near the Capitol, “We must stop the steal…Our country has been under siege for a long time…You are allowed to go by very different rules. You have to get your people to fight. And we fight. We fight like hell.”?

On the House floor Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Cal) had said, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding”. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said before his chamber, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking” the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But as the weeks passed Trump had cemented his position as head of the party as congressional Republicans began to fear that should they show any disloyalty he would use the millions in contributions he was raking in from his followers to fund rivals in the 2022 primaries. He told the GOP, “I am the Party!” and to keep the money flowing in his direction ordered the national committee to stop using his name and likeness in their fund-raising. He held out the prospect that he might run again in 2024, which froze all other contenders in fealty mode.

accessories after the fact?

What must be stopped, what drove Trump wild, was any possibility of a commission to investigate the happenings of January 6th, no matter that the attack on Congress led to five deaths and 140 Capitol police injured. Save for a very few who think we should get at the truth, Republicans readily agreed. Some realize that testimony might implicate them in the insurrection, certainly if they had any contact with members of the marauding groups such as the Proud Buys, the Three Percenters, and others. There was that January 13th letter from 34 members of the House requesting an immediate investigation into who was conducting tours on January 5th — effectively revealing the layout of the Capitol — when the Capitol building was closed to the public. Who might have to explain that? If subpoenaed to testify under oath, what they might be forced to say that might displease Trump. They worry that a commission’s proceedings constantly reminding the public of their day of infamy will carry over into the 2022 election.

So the strategy Republicans have adopted is to rewrite the history of what happened that day, to tell their voters not to trust their lying eyes that had been fooled by all that video footage. They began downplaying one of the worst days in our democracy as if it was not all that bad.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis) claimed it was generally a “peaceful protest”. Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC) questioned whether the mobs were actually Biden supporters in Trump regalia chanting pro-Trump slogans to make the right wing look bad. “I don’t know who did the poll to say that they were Trump supporters,” Mr. Norman said.

And, what about those riots last summer in cities like New York and Oakland? Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, used his time at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing to show video of mob violence purportedly by antifa, which isn’t even an organization, that had unfolded at the other side of the country in Portland, Ore.

Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde (R-Ga) outdid them all, saying that the crowd, taking selfies and staying within the rope
Clyde, second from left at top
,
fortifying a door against attackers

lines, looked more like a “tourist visit” than a riot; he had, for the sake of Donald, erased from memory his moment of terror when he was photographed frantically trying to barricade a door the mob was trying to breach. “Let’s be honest with the American people”, Mr. Clyde said, “It was not an insurrection” because it had not succeeded.

All the while, Mr. Trump was using right-wing cable outlets to endlessly push the false flag fable that the crowd was antifa and Black Lives Matter.

diffusion and dilution

Republicans decided to object to any commission that was narrowly focused. They said it must also probe the nighttime riots (but not the peaceful daytime Black Lives Matter protests) that followed the George Floyd murder last summer. Kevin McCarthy added the murder of Capitol officer William Evans months later on Good Friday and even proposed adding the 2017 attack at a Republican baseball practice that almost killed Rep. Steve Scalise. McCarthy even feigned concern that a commission might interfere with the Justice Department’s prosecution of the Capitol insurrectionists.

The objective was to scatter the focus of the commission, hoping to give Republicans whataboutist opportunities to put looting, vandalism, and the assault on a federal courthouse in Portland supposedly by the amorphous antifa on a par with the worst attack on Congress in two centuries.

caving to trump

McCarthy had deputized Rep. John Katko (R-NY) to work with his Democratic counterpart Bennie Thompson (D-Ms) to iron out disagreements on the format of a commission, expecting failure. But the Democrat yielded three key points to make it work and McCarthy pulled the rug from under their agreement, coming out against the commission. After all, Trump was watching.

On January 6th in the midst of the riot, he had been the first to contact Trump, correcting him for trying to insist the Capitol attackers were antifa, reportedly yelling at Trump to call off the insurgents. Trump responded, “Well Kevin, I guess these people are more concerned about the election than you are”, according to Jaime Herrera-Beutler (R-Wa) who was sequestered with McCarthy during the siege.

But he would thereafter rush to Mar-a-Lago to atone. He could point to his voting against certifying Arizona’s election results, citing Trump’s claims of fraud, and was one of the 126 who signed the amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case brought by Texas that urged the justices to invalidate the votes of four states, none of them his. He was opposed to impeaching Trump for inciting insurrection because “No investigations have been completed; no hearings have been held….” yet now is opposed to just such an undertaking. As the vote for the commission approached, he was all in for Trump.

The House passed the bill to establish the commission 252-to-175, with 35 Republicans voting “Aye”. Trump called the 35 “ineffective and weak”. It should be a safe bet that comparing that list to the 147 who attempted to end democracy on January 6th by voting against certifying the states’ election results will show no overlaps. Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan ripped into the rest of them, yelling on the floor of the House:

“We have people scaling the Capitol, hitting the Capitol police with lead pipes across the head, and we can’t get bipartisanship! What else has to happen in this country? Cops, this is a slap in the face to every rank-and-file cop in the United States…We need two political parties in this country that are both living in reality—and you ain’t one of them”.

Mitch McConnell loathes Donald Trump, blaming him for the loss of his position as majority leader of the Senate for having dissuaded Georgian Republicans from voting in what he said would be a fraudulent runoff, with the result that both Senate seats went to Democrats. McConnell had intoned,.

“No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”

And yet, he had not voted to convict. And now, just a day after saying that his Republican caucus was undecided and “willing to listen”, he called the House commission proposal “slanted and unbalanced” and decided, “There’s no new facts about that day we need the Democrats’ extraneous commission to uncover”.

The real reason for both McCarthy and McConnell is, of course, that commission findings could only tarnish the GOP and possibly jeopardize next year’s election. McCarthy will do anything to please Trump, in the belief that the Maharaja of Mar-a-Logo will anoint him the Speakership in the expected Republican takeover of the House in next year’s elections. For McConnell, nothing is more important that winning the Senate, not for legislative reasons — for that there’s the filibuster to block Biden — but because it would restore him to his mightly position as majority leader.

The January 6th insurrection did not rise in importance to them of the attack far from our shores that warranted 33 Benghazi Select Committee hearings over more than two years that had already been investigated by seven other Congressional committees.

virtue signaling

Lack of any bipartisanship has put the highly principled Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in a quandary. They don’t want the fine old institution of the filibuster done away with by their party. Filibuster retention serves to hand control of the Senate to the Republicans, allowing them to block everything Democrats propose, but for these two that is the regular order of Senate tradition that must be preserved, though found nowhere in the Constitution.

So the two issued a “statement” that implored “our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6th”. It more clearly could have said, “How about some payback for saving your filibuster?”.

Before the Senate vote on the commission, Gladys Sicknick, the mother of fallen Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, issued a statement about her son that read in part:

“He and his fellow officers fought for hours and hours against those animals who were trying to take over the Capitol Building and our Democracy as we know it…Not having a January 6 Commission to look into exactly what occurred is a slap in the faces of all the officers who did their jobs that day”.

She, her son’s partner, and two Capitol police officers requested a meeting with all GOP senators before the vote to urge them to back the commission, but most Republican senators are concerned only for themselves and their reelection and not for those who daily protect them. Fifteen did meet with them, one of them Susan Collins (R-Me) who said, “We owe it to the brave men and women who defended our lives that day and in some cases did so at the cost of their lives”.

As for the rest, that they refused to meet with the mother of an officer who died protecting them shows that Senate Republicans have sunk to the depths of moral bankruptcy.

The procedural vote to overcome the filibuster needed just 10 Republicans to step forward and show their greater concern for the country’s need to learn just what has gone wrong to create such fissures in our society. Manchin said, “So disheartening. It makes you really concerned about our country…I’m still praying that we’ve still got 10 good solid patriots within that conference”. Just 10 would have added to the 50 Democratic votes to reach 60 to end debate and lead to a vote in which only 51 prevails. It should have been a unanimous 100.

Despite the intimation that disgust might cause him to go with the rest of his party, Manchin was still holding out on the side of the non-patriots just before the Senate vote, saying, “I’m not ready to destroy my government, no”.

America’s Infrastructure Earns a C-. Here’s the Report Card

Democrats and their progressive wing don’t think President Biden’s infrastructure plan has gone a bridge too far, but Republicans think it has strayed too far from bridges and what is commonly thought of as infrastructure. His plan doubles as a program to combat climate change such as electric vehicle subsidies, clean energy manufacturing, and what appear to be social programs, such as $400 billion for care of the disabled and elderly. Even if pared back, Republicans refuse to raise taxes to pay for it.

Those controversies have preoccupied the media. Little to no attention has been paid to actual infrastructure — “classic” infrastructure, let’s call it — and the need to reverse its deterioration. Here’s a quick tour of a few infrastructure categories that should remind us how far Update: June 3: Described by us as “a disaster waiting to happen”, the Biden administration has given the go ahead for two tunnels under the Hudson River into New York City after four years of “politics and games”.
    

behind America has fallen and how much needs to be done:

 Start with roads.  Our road network of over four million miles is the world’s biggest. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was impressed by the German autobahns while commanding allied forces in Europe during World War II. He saw the ability to move rapidly throughout the country as key to national defense. Once president, Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act of 1956 which authorized the building of the
Above: Los Angeles highways
interstates, resulting in the world’s best highway and transportation system. But that ranking has sunk to #10 in the World Economic Forum’s review. They handed the top spot to the United Arab Emirates.

Nearly $17 trillion — 72% — of the nation’s goods travel our highways and roads running up 3.2 trillion vehicle miles in 2019. That’s up 18% from 2000. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issues a national report card evaluating 17 categories of infrastructure every four years. Overall, the U.S. gets a C-minus. Thanks to some improvements, at least that’s a tick above the D-plus of four years ago, but roads get a D. Their report says we’ve let a whopping 42% of the road system degenerate to “poor or mediocre condition” by our inattention to the age of highways built decades ago that are now overloaded with five to ten times more traffic than they were designed for. The ASCE assesses that delays and deteriorating roads cause motorists to each spend an unnecessary $1,000 or more a year on repairs and extra gasoline.

Fearing voters, politicians won’t touch raising the gasoline and diesel tax, a waste because gas bought at the pumps nicely correlates with the degree to which motorists will use roads and should chip in. Last changed in 1993, the taxes are stuck at 18.4¢ a gallon on gasoline and 24.4¢ a gallon on diesel, which inflation says should be 32.6¢ and 43.2¢ today.

 Roads made of rails and ties  make up a web of 140,000 miles of track owned by the major freight haulers which “host” Amtrak on 21,400 miles of their roadbed (Amtrak owns only 3% of the route-miles it uses). Overall, the railroads get the ASCE’s highest mark, a B.

One reason for the B rating is probably the $4.4 billion Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program (CREATE) that has been working to untangle commuter and freight lines from the city’s streets with over- and underpasses. One quarter of all rail traffic in the U.S. — 1,300 trains a day — transit Chicago carrying Iowa’s corn, Michigan’s autos, North Dakota’s oil. In the mix are the region’s commuter trains that shut down freight movement during rush hours adding costly delays. One measurement has it that it takes 48 hours for a load of freight to go from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then 30 hours go through Chicago.

The ongoing problem with our railroads is always Amtrak. Profits from the northeast corridor, where the ratio of residents per square mile is 10 times the number along the rest of its routes, are not enough to fund the 523 stations spread on 46 states that Amtrak must serve. Its routes covering greater distances carry about 17% of Amtrak’s passengers but account for some 44% of the system’s cost. Republicans have long nursed a special animus toward paying for the hand dealt Amtrak by population and geography, while not making equivalent complaints about the inequity of governments paying for roads and much of airports. Accepting a deteriorated passenger railroad system from lack of federal support goes to the question of what sort of country we want.

America’s vast distances make long-distance high-speed trains impracticable, and the country’s ritual cost overruns often hobble dream projects. Such is the case with California’s high-speed rail. Approved by voters in 2008, it is intended first to connect San Francisco and and Los Angeles (380 miles) and then on to San Diego in the south and Sacramento further north. Today it finds itself looking for $4.1 billion simply to complete a segment from Merced to Bakersfield (171 miles), with connection to Los Angeles a decade and tens of billions of dollars away. By the way, in 2009 the High Speed Rail Association laid out a plan for 17,000 miles of 220 mph train routes meant for completion by 2030. How’s that going?

 Of the 617,000 bridges in the U.S , 42% are more than 50 years old, the expected life of a bridge. The American Road & Transportation Builders Association reckons that 231,000 bridges need repair at a cost of $164 billion, but rates 55,000 of them — 9% of all U.S. bridges — at the higher priority of “structurally deficient”. Over 70% of bridges are rural, and those make up 79% of the bridges rated as poor or unsound, according to Trip, a transportation research nonprofit group. Moreover, the overage bridges were built for much lower traffic loads.

Yet our bridges continue to be crossed by unwitting truckers and citizens at between, differing estimates say, 174 million and 215 million times every day. In 2007, a stretch
Collapsed I-35W bridge across the Mississippi in Minneapolis

of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed during rush hour, killing 13, injuring 145, and resulting in $234 million in repairs. The Interstate 40 bridge over the Mississippi was just closed for months of repairs when an inspector found a crack in a main support beam. At the present rate of repair and replacement, it will take 37 years to remedy the problem, by which time a lot more bridges will be added to the deficient category.

Hoping to sway Republican Louisiana, President Biden went to Lake Charles to pitch his infrastructure plan with the Calcasieu River Bridge behind him, a span that’s 20 years older than its expected lifespan. The nation’s most gridlocked crossing, though, is the Brent Spence Bridge between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. Its planned capacity was 80,000 crossings a day when built in 1963, but it experiences twice that today. Three major interstate highways converge on Cincinnati making the bridge the link between Michigan and the Southeast with trucks hauling $1 billion in goods across every day. The American Transportation Research Institute ranks the bridge as the fifth worst bottleneck in the nation. People dread crossing owing to the tight spacing — its shoulders had to be converted to extra traffic lanes — with the prospect of encountering jams caused by its two collisions a week.

President Obama made an infrastructure pitch in front of the Brent Spence in 2011. President Trump promised a fix which didn’t happen. Kentucky Senator McConnell rails about its being “outdated and inadequate” but wants no part of any infrastructure spending plan or tax hike to pay for it and vows to do everything possible to block Biden’s infrastructure goals.

 The nation’s power grid needs vast upgrading  to give it the ability to deliver expanding wind and solar power from remote locations to metropolitan areas. At the local level, the 2009 stimulus boosted widespread conversion to smart meters that encourages homeowners to invest in or sign onto rooftop solar to reduce demand from utilities and sell the unused power back to the grid. But most important is the hardening of the entire grid to cyber and physical attacks. Those smart meters have added a daunting number of new entry points for the cyber attacks that barrage the grid — one every four days. On the ground, a 2015 inspection of 1,000 utility substations found that half were vulnerable to physical attack, secured by only a padlock.

 U.S. airports are showing their age.  Many are more than 40 years old. There hasn’t been a new one built since Denver International, a quarter century ago despite an explosion in air travel.

However, the pandemic allowed a number of airport renovation projects to move forward. Almost every major airport in the U.S. — Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, e.g. — has a multi-billion dollar capital improvement program underway. Miami International has announced $5 billion for a terminal optimization program and cargo expansion. Orlando International is spending $2.15 billion on its new 19-gate terminal.

It will come as no surprise to world travelers that no U.S. airport ranks in the global top 10 and New York has two of the world’s worst. Passengers describe Newark’s Liberty International (in New Jersey but serving New York City) as “dirty” and “disorganized”, with long lines packed into cramped space. Some allowance should perhaps be given to its being over 90 years old, opened in 1928. The other is LaGuardia, which at age 82 is decrepit and overcrowded, but it is undergoing a complete overhaul. Among pilots, it is referred to as “USS LaGuardia”. Its short runways surrounded by water give the feel of landing on an aircraft carrier.

Adding to customer grievance is that little thought has typically been given to getting to America’s airports, which is where new federal money might best be spent. In Asian and European cities there are rail links to get from center city to airports, a rarity in the U.S. At Amsterdam’s Schiphol, for example — ranked as one the world’s 10 best — escalators descend from the main terminal to quiet, swift underground trains that run every few minutes to the city’s Centraal Station, which in turn is the hub for all bus and tram lines that fan out through the city, as well as railroad access to the rest of Europe.

 The nation’s water mains  have suffered chronic neglect. Water lines laid in the first half of the last century have never been replaced (gas lines as well). Some date to the 19th century. Utilities and cities often don’t know where they are. Lead is common in water pipes across the country; Flint made the nation aware of the damage lead can do to children, affecting brain and nervous system. Lead pipes were banned in 1986 by Congress but that left in place the lead solder used to seal pipe joints in the lines that connect water mains to houses. That’s the case for two-thirds of America’s 80 million homes.

Back in 2011 the Environmental Protection Agency estimated it would cost $384 billion to continue to provide clean drinking water to Americans, and that entailed work that would take until 2030. Here we are in 2021 with how much done? More recently, the American Waterworks Association thought the bill would be more like $1 trillion across 25 years.

Compare that to a bill just passed by the Senate: $35 billion to improve water systems, particularly in long-neglected rural and tribal communities. At least it was an encouragingly bipartisan vote of 89-2.

 Dams are rated by the threat they pose should they fail , and one did last year in Midland, Michigan, causing “catastrophic” flooding and the evacuation of 10,000 people. Of the nation’s 61,000 dams the number of high-hazard-potential dams has more than doubled over the last 20 years not so much because of their age, averaging 57 years, but because housing and other development advances nearer them.

 The 230 locks and dams along 12,000 miles of American rivers  are largely unknown to the public, yet they provide for the shipment of 14% of domestic freight — $70 billion worth of cargo annually. Particularly crucial are the 23 locks along 200 miles of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers,
A coal barge at the Braddock Locks and Dam in Pennsylvania.

the most fatigued of the nation’s inland waterway system. Some locks are over a hundred years old; those where the Ohio meets the Mississippi come close, built in 1928 and 1929.

Tugboats push up to 15 barges at a time — the equivalent of 225 train cars or 1,050 truckloads — containing several million dollars worth of corn, soybean, aluminum ingots, scrap steel, wheat. More than a million tons of commodities normally pass through the 85-year-old lock on the Monongahela River every month. But crumbling concrete and rusted metal often cause breakdowns of the lock mechanisms, causing delays of 15 to 20 hours. On a stretch of the Ohio River it can take as long as five days to negotiate the locks.

Replacement is costly. The $3 billion building of the Olmstead Locks and Dam on the Ohio in Kentucky to replace Lock and Dam 52 and 53 was begun in 1995 and was not completed until 2018. A $2.7 billion makeover of the Monongahela lock and dam was long delayed. As indication of how underappreciated this category of infrastructure is, President Obama cut the budget for the Corps of Engineers, which maintains most of the system, and President Trump wanted to cut the Corps budget for his final year by 31%.

 The nation’s transit systems — from commuter rail to bus lines — gets the engineer society’s worse grade of D-minus, and that seems apart from the plight of 45% of Americans who don’t have access to public transit at all. There’s a $176 billion backlog of work to be done, a deficit that is expected to grow to more than $270 billion through 2029.

 Transit brings us to tunnels , which aren’t even an ASCE category, and that overlooks the disaster waiting to happen under the Hudson River. Some 2,000 Amtrak and commuter trains log 800,000 passenger trips per day through two single track railroad tunnels that are 111 years old. Pieces of concrete fall onto the tracks, electrical cables are frayed, salt water flooding from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 aged the tunnels with further corroding. Amtrak and commuter trains are frequently stranded by electrical failures.

The chaos of a tunnel’s shutdown for months of repairs would throw the region into chaos and wreak billions in economic damage not just because of New Jersey workers unable to commute to New York City but because rail lines from Boston and points north, to Washington and points south, run through those tunnels. One need only remember the bedlam of lane closings on the George Washington Bridge, the nation’s busiest, when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s staff thought it a good idea to stick it to the on-ramp town’s mayor for not supporting the governor’s election.

Drilling of a new tunnel was a $9 billion project that had begun after environmental reviews that went on interminably from 2003 to 2009 that apparently took no notice that there are already tunnels under the Hudson. But work was halted when Gov. Christie reneged on New Jersey’s share of the cost.

Since, President Trump asked Congress to cancel $900 million in start-up money for the new tunnel to spite New York Sen. Cluck Schumer’s failure to cooperate with Trump on unrelated issues.

Quite a blunder when you think about it. When in 2018 Trump visited Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, he remarked that the first president had missed a golden opportunity. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it”, he said according to accompanying reporters. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you”. Right! What was that guy’s name, “washing” something? By forgetting his own advice, New York’s “The Donald” overlooked an opportunity. It could’ve been The Trump Tunnel.

Arizona Recount to Restore Trump as President Is Just the Beginning

Republicans of the Arizona senate have set out to prove that the three audits, reviews, and recounts of the state’s 2020 presidential election came up with the wrong answer. It’s always been a red state (1996 presidency excepted). Biden couldn’t have won.

To uncover the fraud that must be the only explanation, yet another count of the 2.1 million ballots of Maricopa County was ordered by the state senate and is underway as we write.

Maricopa weighs in with two-thirds of the state’s votes; its votes delivered the wins for Democrats Biden and former astronaut and now Senator Mark Kelly, so other counties were not considered. And only the election of Biden and Kelly are being analyzed. Apparently there was no fraud in any of the races around the state that Republicans won.

Recount taking place in the Arizona Veterans
Memorial Coliseum

The former president is, of course, ecstatic. He put out a “Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America” thanking “the brave and patriotic Republican State Senators from Arizona for the incredible job they are doing”, admonishing Democrats for sending lawyers to Arizona…

“in an effort to stop this recount and full transparency because THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID! The Democrats are desperate for the FRAUD to remain concealed because, when revealed, the Great States of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, New Hampshire, and the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, would be forced to complete the work already started.”

He concluded with “I predict the results will be startling”.

only one acceptable answer

Arizona’s vote has been audited by federally accredited firms, twice, with a second audit ordered by the state legislature, and by a hand count overseen by both parties. Biden’s win was certified unanimously by the Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County which has five seats, and four of them are held by Republicans.

This fourth count is not state supervised. Even so, the senate has authorized $150,000 of taxpayer money to cover part of the cost. No press is allowed other than the little known One America News Network (OANN) which is televising the proceedings. The audit is overseen by a private sector company out of Florida that calls itself Cyber Ninjas. You read that correctly. The company is run by Doug Logan, a QAnon believer who is in the “Stop the Steal” camp and backs conspiracy theories on social media such as the story that the US Army seized a secret computer server in Germany that held the real vote totals showing not only that Trump won the election, but that he swept with 400 electoral votes, and even won California.

In the Arizona count, Logan had his workers expose ballots to ultra-violet light to look for folds that would reveal we’re not sure what. A search for bamboo fibers was next because hadn’t former President Trump said, “Ballots will be printed by foreign countries…It will be the scandal of our times!”.

Logan’s company evidently got the auditing contract owing to a report he wrote at the request of Arizona’s Republican Senate President Karen Fann to give reason for her cohort to object to certification of Arizona’s vote in the U.S. Senate on January 6th. Along with onetime Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, on whose website his document was also posted, Logan believes that the software used by Dominion Voting Systems, the manufacturer of voting machines used in Arizona and a number of states, came from Smartmatic, and alleges that company was founded in Venezuela, had ties to Hugo Chavez, the country’s socialist dictator who died in 2013, and engineered its software to flip votes. There is no proof, Dominion doesn’t use Smartmatic’s software, and the two companies have filed suit against all who dreamed up and propagated this fanciful story including a $1.6 billion suit against Fox News. This is who is running the audit.

There are companies that manage the tricky business of recounts, but nothing on Cyber Ninjas’ website says anything about this capability. A judge asked the company to submit its plans and procedures over concerns for ballot security and privacy but the company’s lawyer refused, arguing that its methods are proprietary and needed to be kept secret.

“Clearly the documents that Cyber Ninjas has been ordered to file are confidential information…including that they constitute business information and concepts as well as operational information and records and reflect the know-how of the Cyber Ninjas.”

As a consequence there are no safeguards protecting the ballots and voting equipment from being compromised. Without knowledge of how they will be treated, Arizona is giving custody of the state’s ballots to QAnon.

Democrats filed a lawsuit to stop the recount saying it was illegal. The judge said he’d pause the count over the final April weekend while the merits of their suit were considered but came up with an insupportable invention, that the Democrats would have to put up a million dollars to cover any costs caused by the delay. The Democrats refused.

One reporter, Jen Fifield of The Arizona Republic did gain entry by signing up as an observer. Interviewed on Rachel Maddow’s show, she says training was negligible, cell phones were not allowed, nor photos, nor note-taking. Fifield did observe that people handling the ballots were given blue pens, which, along with black, are readable by ballot scanners. They are supposed only to be given red pens which are not. One cannot erase a blue/black circle already filled-in by a voter, but a ballot can be rendered invalid by, say, filling in the Trump circle as well as an already filled-in Biden circle, resulting in the scanner kicking out what had been a Biden vote as an invalidly filled out ballot.

Fifield pointed this out to Logan, who first thought her wrong, then substituted red and green pens, but when Fifield applied again to be an observer after her first six-hour shift, she was refused re-entry.

A little history

Trump’s plan was to declare victory on election night. Voters who went to the polls in person were correctly assumed to be mostly Republicans, so Trump would be in the lead that night. Mailed-in ballots, assumed predominantly to be from Democrats, were yet to be fully counted. Trump was therefore incensed at Fox News spoilers for calling Biden the victor in Arizona, doing so at 11:20 on election night with 27% of the vote still to be counted. When in the days following Fox apprised viewers that Trump’s claim of winning the election was not true, the president denounced the network for having forgotten “what made them successful, what got them there” calling himself “the Golden Goose”. He bestowed his favor on Newsmax and OANN. That’s how OANN, which had always been for Trump, saw opportunity and overnight became a Trump propaganda dispenser.

OANN has tossed aside all principles of impartiality in news coverage, instead contributing to help cover the cost of an audit that aims to show Donald Trump won in Arizona. News host Christina Bobb even has her own political group called “Voices and Votes” and openly went fund raising. She asked the far-right firebrand lawyer Lin Wood to pitch in. Wood, a high-profile medical malpractice lawyer, often paired with fellow lawyer Sydney Powell in their claims that the election was stolen. Wood had his group, Fight Back, contribute $50,000. Cyber Ninjas is not revealing the source of the rest of the money.

Wood seems to have embraced every conspiracy theory. Just days ago at a rally in South Carolina — he’s running for office &#0151 Wood flashed the QAnon “Q” sign with his fingers and proclaimed “Donald J. Trump is still president of the United States of America, and don’t you forget it. Eighty million people said ‘we the people, we pick Donald J. Trump'”. That, of course, was Biden’s vote count; Trump’s was 73 million. He has made nonsensical claims linking Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, says Barack Obama is a Muslin, and thinks former Vice President Mike Pence should face “execution by firing squad” for failing to stop the certification of Biden’s election victory on January 6th.

Wood is in league with Logan. He told Talking Points Memo that Logan was staying at his South Carolina property late last year when Logan and others were investigating 2020 election fraud. When in April Wood learned that Logan was leading the audit team, Wood said “He is a man of God, he will reveal the truth”.

foregone conclusion?

It will come as a surprise if Cyber Ninjas reports anything other than Trump won after all. They are in a mission assigned by the Arizona senate to right the terrible wrong of handing electoral votes to Biden. The giveaway of what the audit’s outcome will be was what the company lawyer additionally said to the judge, that Cyber Ninjas “expects to have similar business opportunities to undertake such work for other governments around the country”. Why would they so expect if there was the possibility of coming up with nothing in Arizona?

Sure enough, a circuit court judge in Antrim County, Michigan, just said he will allow a dozen technology and election experts, Cyber Ninjas included, to pursue claims of fraud in opposition to the secretary of state’s election report that determined mistakes in Michigan voting results were no more than human error.

burning down the house

In “Why Do We Let the Big Lie of a Stolen Election Stand?”, we argued for requiring all Trump campaign lawyers to present their evidence of fraud and irregularities in the sixty-plus cases they filed before a publicly televised commission. Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have blinders on, though, preoccupied by her desire for a commission on the January 6th insurrection, which will be redundant of so much that has already been examined, while doing nothing to overcome the belief that the election was stolen. She fails to see that the House will certainly be lost if no action is taken and the Big Lie is allowed to live on.

May 8 2021 | Posted in Election | Read More »