Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’

 

One of the enduring mysteries surrounding the chaotic attempts to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential battle 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. It was later divulged 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, the New York Times reported 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 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 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”.
 
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, 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. 

-Brendan Fischer & Ed Pilkington, The Guardian