From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Revealed: Trump Made Secret $1M Donation to Arizona ‘Audit’ Trying To Overturn Election
Date January 28, 2023 1:00 AM
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[Arizona Republican leaders who asked Cyber Ninjas to carry out
the audit publicly denied that Trump was involved, saying “this
absolutely has nothing to do with Trump”. Documented’s analysis
pierces that denial. ]
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REVEALED: TRUMP MADE SECRET $1M DONATION TO ARIZONA ‘AUDIT’
TRYING TO OVERTURN ELECTION  
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Brendan Fischer and Ed Pilkington
January 27, 2023
documented.net
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_ Arizona Republican leaders who asked Cyber Ninjas to carry out the
audit publicly denied that Trump was involved, saying “this
absolutely has nothing to do with Trump”. Documented’s analysis
pierces that denial. _

, by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 

One of the enduring mysteries surrounding the chaotic attempts to
overturn Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential race results
has been solved: who made a secret $1m donation to the controversial
election “audit” in Arizona?

The identity of one of the largest benefactors behind the discredited
review of Arizona’s vote count has been shrouded in secrecy. Now the
Guardian can reveal that the person who partially bankrolled the
failed attempt to prove that the election was stolen from Trump was
… Trump.

An analysis by the watchdog group Documented has traced funding for
the Arizona audit back to Trump’s Save America Pac. The group
tracked the cash as it passed from Trump’s fund through an allied
conservative group, and from there to a shell company which in turn
handed the money to contractors and individuals involved in the
Arizona audit.

Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that led the Arizona audit,
disclosed in 2021 that $5.7m of its budget came from several far-right
groups invested in the “stop the steal” campaign to overturn Joe
Biden’s presidential victory. The Arizona Republic later reported
[[link removed]]
that a further $1m had supported the audit from an account controlled
by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican election lawyer who advised Trump as
he plotted to subvert the 2020 election.

But who gave the $1m to Mitchell? In September 2021, as Cyber Ninjas
was preparing to deliver its findings
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the New York Times reported
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that unnamed “officials” had denied that Trump had played any part
in securing the funds.

Republican leaders of the Arizona senate who asked Cyber Ninjas to
carry out the audit also publicly denied that Trump was involved,
saying “this absolutely has nothing to do with Trump”.

Documented’s analysis pierces through that denial. Basing its
research on corporate, tax and campaign finance filings, as well as
emails and text messages obtained by the non-partisan accountability
group American Oversight
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through public records requests, the watchdog has followed the money
on its circuitous journey from the former US president’s Pac to the
Arizona review.

‘Highly hypocritical’

Cyber Ninjas’ widely-lambasted inquiry, which was ordered by the
Republican-controlled Arizona senate, was focused on Maricopa county,
Arizona’s most populated area. Biden won the county by 45,109 votes.

The purported investigation was suffused with wild conspiracy
theories, including the claim that bamboo fibers found in ballot
sheets proved they had been printed in Asia. The review was decried
even by local Republicans as a “grift disguised as an audit
[[link removed]]”.

Bill Gates, the Republican vice-chair of the Maricopa county board of
supervisors at the time of the Cyber Ninjas audit, said he was
“disappointed, but not surprised” by the Guardian’s revelation
that Trump had helped to pay for it. “I have no problem with
audits,” Gates said.

“What I have a problem with is an audit that is undertaken with a
goal in mind, and that is literally being funded by one of the
candidates. This is absolutely what we do not want to happen.”

Gates pointed out that under Arizona law
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electoral candidates are not allowed to fund vote recounts which have
to be financed with taxpayer dollars. Though the Cyber Ninjas review
was technically not a recount, it served a similar purpose.

“At the very least, it is highly hypocritical for the Arizona state
senate to have allowed the audit to be funded in this fashion,”
Gates said.

The money trail exposed by Documented begins with Trump’s loosely
regulated leadership PAC, Save America, which raised millions in the
wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat on the back of the false election fraud
narrative
[[link removed]].
In its final report released in December, the bipartisan January 6
committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol highlighted
how Save America PAC gave $1 million to the Conservative Partnership
Institute
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(CPI).

The committee did not say what the money was for, or where it ended
up.

Top CPI officials include Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of
staff, along with other senior Trump insiders after they left the
White House. The organisation is developing a political infrastructure
to sustain the former president’s Make America Great Again (MAGA)
movement.

Documented’s research shows that discussions around a possible
payment from Trump to the Arizona audit began in June 2021. Records
obtained by American Oversight
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reveal that on 27 June, the retired Army colonel and arch election
denier Phil Waldron texted
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the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, Doug Logan, saying: “Kurt is going to talk
to 45 today about $$”.

The “45” in the text is a reference to Trump – the 45th
president of the US – and “Kurt” may have been a reference to
the election-denying lawyer Kurt Olsen
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Waldron added: “Mike L talking to Corey L” – alluding to Mike
Lindell
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chief executive of MyPillow who is a devotee of Trump’s stolen
election lie, and the former Trump presidential campaign manager Corey
Lewandowski.

On 16 July 2021, Waldron asked Logan
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if he had received “a 1mil [payment] from Corey Lewendowsk [sic]”.
He went on: “Supposedly Kurt talked to trump and they got 1 mil for
you,” but that “I couldn’t verify who sent and who received.”

Logan responded that he had not yet received payment from Trump.

Ten days later, on 26 July 2021, Trump’s Save America PAC made its
$1 million transfer to CPI, according to Federal Election Commission
records [[link removed]].
Two days after that, on 28 July, a new group called the American
Voting Rights Foundation (AVRF) was registered as a corporation in
Delaware [[link removed]].

Tax filings obtained recently show that CPI in turn gave $1 million
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to AVRF in 2021– the only known donation that the group has ever
received. The date of CPI’s donation to AVRF is not a matter of
public record, but other details – including CPI’s relationship
with AVRF, the timing and amounts of the known transfers, and the
discussion among Trump allies about the former president’s plans to
give $1 million to the audit 10 days before Trump gave $1 million to
CPI – clearly indicate that it was the money that came from
Trump’s PAC.

Records obtained by American Oversight
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showed that AVRF was connected to Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer
who is now a senior fellow at CPI. She is best known for having taken
part in the infamous phone call
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in January 2021 that is now being weighed by an Atlanta prosecutor
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in which Trump tried to pressure Georgia’s top election official to
“find 11,780 votes” needed for him to win.

Documented has discovered that the ties between CPI and AVRF went even
deeper. CPI
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entities
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effectively controlled AVRF.

Tax records
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show that AVRF’s “direct controlling entity” is America First
Legal
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the CPI-launched project led by Trump’s former speechwriter Stephen
Miller. Tax records
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also show that another CPI project, the Center for Renewing America,
lists AVRF as one of its “related organizations”.

The final stage in the money’s journey was from AVRF to Cyber Ninjas
and the audit itself. The same day that AVRF was registered in
Delaware – 28 July 2021 – Mitchell sent an email
[[link removed]]connecting
the Cyber Ninjas CEO Logan, together with the spokesman of the audit
Randy Pullen, to AVRF’s treasurer Tom Datwyler.

The email, contained in the documents obtained by American Oversight
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spelled out that money was about to be transferred from AVRF to
Arizona contractors approved by Cyber Ninjas.

The last step was recorded in an email
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sent the following day, 29 July, in which Mitchell itemized $1 million
split into three separate payments going to two entities supporting
the audit and to individuals “working at the audit site”. CPI
president Ed Corrigan is cc’d on the email.

The money had reached its destination, with no Trump fingerprints
anywhere in sight.

The Guardian has invited both Save America Pac and CPI to comment but
they did not immediately respond.

“Counter to transparency”

A final mystery remains: why would Trump and his inner circle go to
such lengths to keep the former president’s bankrolling of the audit
secret? One theory is that Trump might have been worried that the
audit would look less credible should he be seen to be funding it.

Another possible scenario is that he feared that the review might
prove to be such a shambles that he wanted to keep his distance.

In the end, the Cyber Ninjas audit not only lacked credibility, it
also spectacularly failed to meet its goal. In September 2021, the
firm released the results of its investigation
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and found that Biden had indeed won Maricopa County by 360 more votes
than the official count.

No conclusive evidence of fraud was uncovered, and the claims raised
by the audit were thoroughly debunked in a 93-page report
[[link removed]].
Cyber Ninjas went out of business
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in January 2022.

On Thursday, the _Arizona Republic_ reported
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evidence that despite the denials Trump was intimately involved in the
audit. New records obtained by the newspaper show that Trump was being
directly informed about the progress of the audit as it was being
conducted.

Newly released messages from the Cyber Ninjas chief Logan also show
that he discussed the need for any Trump donation to be made in
secret. “I told them there was no way I could take funds
directly,” he said in a private digital chat.

Gates, the Maricopa County supervisor, said that a large portion of
the $1 million that ended up with the Arizona audit would have come
from small donations to Trump’s PAC.“It’s sad that so many small
donors had their money used for this effort, and Trump’s attempt to
hide that was certainly counter to transparency.”

_Brendan Fischer [[link removed]] is
Documented's Deputy Executive Director. He is a lawyer with expertise
in campaign finance and government transparency issues. Brendan has
authored op-eds for publications such as the New York Times and
Washington Post, and regularly appears as an expert on print, radio,
and television outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, National Public Radio, MSNBC, CNN, and numerous other
outlets. He was previously the Director of Federal Reform at Campaign
Legal Center._

_Ed Pilkington [[link removed]] is
chief reporter for Guardian US. He is the author of Beyond the Mother
Country. Twitter @edpilkington [[link removed]].
Click here
[[link removed]] for
Ed's public key_

_Documented is an investigative watchdog and journalism project
committed to holding the powerful interests that undermine our
democracy accountable._

_We believe that hard-hitting, investigative journalism is needed now
more than ever._

_Corporations and wealthy donors have far too much power and influence
in our political and justice systems. Profits and shareholders are too
often put ahead of everyday people. The very real and urgent dangers
of climate change are being downplayed or ignored. Our democracy
itself is under attack._

_None of us are neutral in these fights, and we don't pretend to be.
Documented works to level the playing field by pulling back the
curtain on those in power to expose corruption. We publish and report
on documents, audio, video and other materials that lay bare corporate
interests and their network of operatives’ best laid plans to rig
the system._

_Guardian Media Group [[link removed]] is a global news
organisation that delivers fearless, investigative journalism -
giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account._

_Our independent ownership structure means we are entirely free from
political and commercial influence. Only our values determine the
stories we choose to cover – relentlessly and courageously._

This story was published in partnership with the Guardian
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* Donald Trump
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* Arizona
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* election fraud
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