Phil Waldron, a Trump-supporting former US Army colonel living in Texas who promoted a plan to declare a national emergency to halt the certification of ballots in the presidential election on January 6th, was in direct contact with Republicans in the Arizona state senate as they formed their plot to undermine the voters of the state, pushing senators to issue subpoenas to seize voting machines to perform an “audit,” the Arizona Republic reports.
Along with senate Republicans, Waldron also worked with Trump’s legal team and the Cyber Ninjas, the unqualified now-shuttered group the state GOP ultimately selected to undertake a hand recount, telling them what data they should seek information on absentee ballots, Dominion voting machines, computer server security logs and any associated domain names to try to throw doubt onto the final results.
Waldron’s text messages, obtained by the outlet, show that he was regularly in touch with Republican then-Senate President Karen Fann, urging her to push through legislation to seize the machines. Waldron also exchanged hundreds of messages with Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan. For example: “Hey, Phil, when you helped them with that subpoena, did you include the absentee ballot envelopes,” Logan asked in a March 5th, 2021, text. A July 14th, 2021 text read from Logan: “I asked the Senate where that subpoena item came from and they said from you ;-).”
A resident of Dripping Springs, Texas, Waldron was called to testify before the House Select Committee investigating the Republican-led January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress, but repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when questioned about his role in the conspiracy, including his reported creation of a 38-page PowerPoint presentation entitled “titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan[.]”. Witnesses say that while legal and campaign officials dismissed the plan as batshit crazy, Trump was fixated on it and repeatedly tried to get his minions to adopt it.
While there is no known investigation going on in Arizona or Maricopa County regarding a wide-scale conspiracy to disenfranchise voters currently going on in the state, the existence of these communications demonstrate a far more complex and coordinated scheme involving Trump lawyers and state Republicans to find a vaguely-plausible reason to void the legitimate results of a contested state.