Karen Fann's emails conveniently scrubbed
The Arizona Senate Republicans continue to make themselves look bad in terms of transparency.
It’s not news to say former senate president and audit queen Karen Fann lost the respect of most of the state during the fallout of the 2020 election that didn’t go Trump’s way when she chomped at the bit to help prove nonexistent fraud in the presidential election.
She lied and gaslit the public countless of times over a two-year span until her eventual retirement from public office. But typically in government, even when you retire your public documents (emails, texts, etc) stay available long after you’re gone.
The Arizona Senate, much to the chagrin of the public (the people who pay for government employees’ salaries), is not typical.
On January 25, the 16 Senate Republicans (and 31 in the House) all agreed to scrub their emails (read: public records) every 90 days. Whatever explanation or excuse they provided is simply put, bullshit. They did it because they want to continue to act shady and keep their public business private because they will always look bad, but don’t want everyone to know what they are up to.
Perfect example is their consistent losing public records battle in the courts of the “audit” public records between Fann, current Senate President Warren Petersen, Cyber Ninjas and others.
Again and again we learned through the court-mandated public records just what Republican senators and their unqualified contractor were up to via their communications.
Now, if it’s not in a 90-day window, we will never know.1
In my search for public records (an instance where I knew exactly what I was looking for except I couldn’t figure out the when) I requested communication records between Fann and We The People AZ Alliance.
The info I was seeking was luckily just confirmed by the Arizona Republic, but the Senate has scrubbed nearly all of Fann’s public records since October 27, 2022. (I requested records the day of the rule change and Oct 27 is 90 days prior.)
In failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit to prove fraud in the 2022 election, these paragraphs raised some eyebrows.
The State Senate fought tooth-and-nail with Maricopa County over handing over an external hard drive that had voter signature data as its contents (among other information). The county was squeamish about this ending up in the wrong hands, but because of a subpoena had to turn it over.
Fann then gifted all of that data to these independent third-party nobodies who have spent countless hours spreading batshit lies about many topics including elections, and have actively (but repeatedly failed) tried to remove the five county supervisors through the state’s recall effort.
If you’re wondering, yes, this is the same voter information Kari Lake, the plaintiff in the above lawsuit, posted on her Twitter to which Secretary of State Adrian Fontes requested Attorney General Kris Mayes investigate for breaking the law.
We the People AZ Alliance, of course, lied about where they received the information in a legislative committee hearing saying they got it from the county. They got the info from Fann. She, once again, is responsible for this chaos.
In efforts to be transparent, I knew about this in December, but spent the better part of January trying to figure out when it took place. I obviously did not know the Senate was planning to delete their public records on January 25 so on a crap shoot requested her emails with We the People between July through December.
The Republic figured out it was Fann not the county that turned over the hard drive and it happened in June. I modified my request to include June and then on February 10, I received two pages.
An email from Fann to Shelby Busch, the leader of We the People, that had no message body and
an attachment of something called the “blue memo.”
This was on December 22 when Fann was almost complete her final term in the legislature and Petersen was already Senate President-elect. Fann and Busch were clearly still in contact given she wanted her to have this email sent to “all users” at the Arizona Legislature.
The memo was to alert members Petersen hired Gina Swoboda to the majority staff to be the senior policy advisor for the Elections Committee chaired by Wendy Rogers, the virulent antisemite.
Swoboda is an election denier who was Trump’s 2020 election day operations director in Arizona.
Curiously, Swoboda was not listed under Senate Staff in my previous request I reported on last month.2
Petersen notes Swoboda “is dedicated to ensuring transparency in elections … outside Arizona.”
“Ensuring transparency.” How ironic.
Legislators decline to provide public records all the time even before this ridiculous last-minute rule change. They also attempt to skirt around public records by using their personal email addresses, which are still public records if the contents are relating to public business. But that doesn’t matter to them. Never has.
The way Petersen worded it makes it sound like she could be working on contract with the Senate rather than a full-time policy advisor. You can bet I will be looking into this.
so they deleted all their emails as soon as the Senate changed the rules?
I guess they feel they can apply the new retroactively cause... there are no rules?