“Newly released emails sent to and from Arizona state senators reveal that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani reached out personally to urge GOP officials there to move forward with a partisan recount of the 2020 election, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud or other issues. Hundreds of pages of emails related to the GOP-ordered audit underway in Maricopa County were obtained by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act. The group published them Friday, along with a scathing statement that decried the audit as a ‘sham partisan crusade.'”

“In one email dated Dec. 2, Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann (R) told two constituents that she had spoken with Giuliani ‘at least 6 times over the past two weeks.’ In another exchange dated Dec. 28, a constituent threatened that Fann would be recalled by ‘the new patriot movement of the United States’ for not standing up for Trump. Fann assured him that the state Senate was ‘doing everything legally possible to get the forensic audit done’ and that they planned to sue the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. (The Republican-led board in November had voted unanimously to certify the county’s election results, with the board chairman declaring there was no evidence of fraud or misconduct ‘and that is with a big zero.’) ‘I have been in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done,’ Fann wrote in the Dec. 28 message. ‘I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud'” – The Washington Post.