Editor’s Thought Bubble: The Senate’s election audit clown show

Senate Republicans have so far defended Chief Auditor Doug Logan (of the oh-so-professionally named firm Cyber ​​Ninjas) as perfectly qualified to lead the audit of all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County in November and all of the county’s Dominion Voting System tabulation machines, even though he spent the months after the election howling at the moon on Twitter about invented fraud in the election that revolved around those same Dominion machines. Today, we learned from Jeremy Duda’s reporting that Logan wasn’t just speaking into the digital ether on Twitter, he was responsible for creating a defense of the preposterous theory that American voting companies were stealing an election from Donald Trump because they were agents of Venezeula, China and other foreign ne’er-do-wells.

Perhaps the most prominent progenitor of this nonsense is one-time Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, who promised to “unleash the kraken” on Dominion and Smartmatic, another election administration firm. Following an unhinged press conference, Team Trump jettisoned her, but Powell persisted and ended up filing several of her “kraken” lawsuits in battleground states, seeking to overturn the election. They were even crazier than her public statements, and judges laughed them out of court because they were based on supposition and fuzzy math and fictions, not evidence.

Powell is being sued by Dominion for more than $1 billion and has simultaneously claimed in her defense that “no reasonable person” would believe her statements and that she still believes what she said, which is about as perfect a pair of statements as there could be. Her website includes documents claiming to prove her wild theories, including one authored by Doug Logan in early January that includes many assertions that have been thoroughly debunked.

I have faith that at least a few Senate Republicans have not abandoned all reason and are guided by their moral center, not their political aspirations. At what point will they stand up and tell Senate President Karen Fann and her merry band of election arsonists that enough is enough and this audit is indefensible?