U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday hosted the leaders of India, Japan and Australia for a meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad, part of his foreign policy push to focus on the Indo-Pacific region and counter a rising China. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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A Republican-backed review of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona’s largest county ended Friday without producing proof to support former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

After six months of searching for evidence of fraud, the firm hired by Republican lawmakers issued a report that experts described as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, even that partisan review came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden won by 360 more votes than the official results certified last year.

The finding was an embarrassing end to a widely criticized, and at times bizarre, quest to prove allegations that election officials and courts have rejected. It has no bearing on the final, certified results. Previous reviews by nonpartisan professionals that followed state law found no significant problem with the vote count in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix.

Still, for many critics, the conclusions reached by the firm Cyber Ninjas and presented at a hearing Friday underscored the dangerous futility of the exercise, which has helped fuel skepticism about the validity of the 2020 election and spawned copycat audits nationwide.

“We haven’t learned anything new,” said Matt Masterson, a top U.S. election security official in the Trump administration. “What we have learned from all this is that the Ninjas were paid millions of dollars, politicians raised millions of dollars and Americans’ trust in democracy is lower.”

‘They are trying to scare people’

Other critics said the true purpose of the audit may have already succeeded. It spread complex allegations about ballot irregularities and software issues, fueling doubts about elections, said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who oversaw the Maricopa County election office last year.

“They are trying to scare people into doubting the system is actually working,” he said. “That is their motive. They want to destroy public confidence in our systems.”

The review was authorized by the Republican-controlled state Senate, which subpoenaed the election records from Maricopa County and selected the inexperienced, pro-Trump auditors. On Friday, Senate President Karen Fann sent a letter to Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich, urging him to investigate issues the report flagged. However, she noted the review found the official count matched the ballots.

“This is the most important and encouraging finding of the audit,” Fann wrote.

Trump issued statements Friday falsely claiming the results demonstrated “fraud.”

Despite being widely pilloried, the Arizona review has become a model that Trump supporters are pushing to replicate in other swing states where Biden won. Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general sued Thursday to block a GOP-issued subpoena for a wide array of election materials. In Wisconsin, a retired conservative state Supreme Court justice is leading a Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 election, and this week threatened to subpoena election officials who don’t comply.

None of the reviews can change Biden’s victory, which was certified by officials in each of the swing states he won and by Congress on Jan. 6 — after Trump’s supporters, fueled by the same false charges that generated the audits, stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent certification of his loss.

The Arizona report claims a number of shortcomings in election procedures and suggests the final tally still could not be relied upon. Several claims were challenged by election experts, while members of the Republican-led county Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections, disputed claims on Twitter.

“Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election,” county officials tweeted.

Election officials say that’s because the review team is biased, ignored the detailed vote-counting procedures in Arizona law and had no experience in the complex field of election audits.

‘The Senate’s contractors don’t understand election processes’

Two of the report’s recommendations stood out because they showed its authors misunderstood election procedures — that there should be paper ballot backups and that voting machines should not be connected to the internet. All Maricopa ballots are already paper, with machines only used to tabulate the votes, and those tabulators are not connected to the internet.

The review also checked the names of voters against a commercial database, finding 23,344 reported moving before ballots went out in October. While the review suggests something improper, election officials note that voters like college students, those who own vacation homes or military members can move to temporary locations while still legally voting at the address where they are registered.

“A competent reviewer of an election would not make a claim like that,” said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.

The election review was run by Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, whose firm has never conducted an election audit before. Logan previously worked with attorneys and Trump supporters trying to overturn the 2020 election and appeared in a film questioning the results of the contest while the ballot review was ongoing.

Logan and others involved with the review presented their findings to two Arizona senators Friday. It kicked off with Shiva Ayyadurai, a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic who claims to have invented email, presenting an analysis relying on “pattern recognition” that flagged purported anomalies in the way mail ballots were processed at the end of the election.

Maricopa County tweeted that the pattern was simply the election office following state law.

“‘Anomaly’ seems to be another way of saying the Senate’s contractors don’t understand election processes,” the county posted during the testimony.

Logan followed up by acknowledging “the ballots that were provided for us to count … very accurately correlated with the official canvass.” He then continued to flag statistical discrepancies — including the voters who moved — that he said merited further investigation.

The review has a history of exploring outlandish conspiracy theories, dedicating time to checking for bamboo fibers on ballots to see if they were secretly shipped in from Asia. It’s also served as a content-generation machine for Trump’s effort to sow skepticism about his loss, pumping out misleading and out-of-context information that the former president circulates long after it’s been debunked.

In July, for example, Logan laid out a series of claims stemming from his misunderstanding of the election data he was analyzing, including that 74,000 mail ballots were recorded as received but not sent. Trump repeatedly amplified the claims.Logan had compared two databases that track different things.

Arizona’s Senate agreed to spend $150,000 on the review, plus security and facility costs. That pales in comparison to the nearly $5.7 million contributed as of late July by Trump allies.

Maricopa County’s official vote count was conducted in front of bipartisan observers, as were legally required audits meant to ensure voting machines work properly. A partial hand-count spot check found a perfect match.

Two extra post-election reviews by federally certified election experts also found no evidence that voting machines switched votes or were connected to the internet. The county Board of Supervisors commissioned the extraordinary reviews in an effort to prove to Trump backers that there were no problems. 
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President Joe Biden will not invoke executive privilege to shield former President Donald Trump’s records in relation to an investigation into the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday. 

“The president has already concluded that it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege,” Psaki said. “And so, we will respond promptly to these questions as they arise.” 

The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the deadly January 6 riot at the Capitol has subpoenaed four former members of Donald Trump’s administration, including Mark Meadows and Steve Bannon, the panel’s chairman said on Thursday. 

A mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6 as Congress was meeting to certify Democrat Biden’s presidential election victory, delaying that process for several hours as then-Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress, staff and journalists fled from rioters. 

Trump said he would fight the subpoenas “on executive privilege and other grounds.” 

Executive privilege allows the White House to refuse to comply with demands for records such as congressional subpoenas or Freedom of Information Act requests. The legal principle is rooted in the idea that some privacy should be given to presidential advisers so they can have candid discussions. 

A sitting president has in the past used executive privilege to keep records and communications from an earlier administration secret, but it is rare. 

With Biden nixing executive privilege, it was widely expected that Trump would file a legal challenge. 

Representatives for the former president were not immediately available for comment.
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U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday he takes full responsibility for the treatment of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Biden called the ongoing situation, which days ago saw mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents aggressively confront migrants, an “embarrassment” to the country. 

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Biden said it was horrible to see people being “treated like they did.” 

“Of course, I take responsibility. I’m president,” he said, adding there will be an investigation and consequences for Border Patrol officers whose actions prompted widespread condemnation.

“It’s an embarrassment. But beyond embarrassment, it is dangerous. It’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world. … It’s simply not who we are,” he said.

The president’s comments came near the end of a week that plunged the Biden administration into crisis mode over the treatment of thousands of Haitian migrants encamped at the border town of Del Rio, Texas, desperate to enter the United States. 

Of some 15,000 Haitians who initially gathered there — two-thirds of them families — only several thousand now remain, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). While some have been paroled into the United States for eventual consideration of asylum claims, many others have been sent to U.S. Customs and Border Protection stations to be expelled or otherwise removed from the United States. 

DHS reports roughly 2,000 Haitian nationals have been returned to Haiti on 17 flights, with repatriation flights still ongoing.

U.S. officials believe several thousand Haitian migrants have crossed back into Mexico.

The situation has provoked fierce outcries from the administration’s political allies and adversaries alike. Ambassador Daniel Foote, who served as U.S. special envoy to Haiti since July, submitted his resignation on Wednesday to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis. 

Foote said the U.S. approach to Haiti “remains deeply flawed,” adding that his advice had been “ignored and dismissed” in Washington “when not edited to project a different narrative from my own.”

State Department spokesperson Ned Price denied Foote’s complaints, saying Foote’s views “were fully considered in a rigorous and transparent policy process. Some of those proposals were determined to be harmful to our commitment to the promotion of democracy in Haiti and were rejected during the policy process. For him to say his proposals were ignored is simply false.”

While many have expressed shock and horror over the tactics Border Patrol agents deployed against Haitian migrants, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina took to Twitter with a different take. 

“God bless the men and women of our Border Patrol who are being asked to do the impossible,” Graham tweeted. “All the while they are being scapegoated and demagogued by the most incompetent Administration in modern American history.” 

Graham called on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign, saying America’s border is being “surrendered.”
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Eight women – three vice presidents and five prime ministers – are scheduled to speak Friday at the United Nations General Assembly.

“We cannot save our planet if we leave out the vulnerable – the women, the girls the minorities,” Slovakian President Zuzana Caputova told the assembly earlier in the week.

“COVID-19 is threatening to roll back the gains that we have made,” Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, the first female president of her country, told the U.N. body Thursday.

Also Thursday, the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned at a food summit that seeks to improve global food production and access that nearly half the planet cannot afford healthy food.

“Food is life. But in countries, communities and households in every corner of the world, this essential need — this human right — is going unfulfilled,” Guterres told the virtual Food Systems Summit on the sidelines of the General Assembly’s annual gathering.

Guterres said that 3 billion people cannot afford nutritious food.

“Every day, hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry. Children are starving,” he said.

While millions starve and famine is a reality in parts of Yemen and Ethiopia, nearly one-third of all food production is lost or wasted.

The summit, in the works for more than a year, aims to take a fresh look at every aspect of food production to make it more environmentally friendly, safe, nutritious and accessible. It is also part of advancing the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, among which “zero hunger” is a top priority.

Pandemic increases challenge

“The COVID-19 pandemic has made this challenge much greater,” Guterres said. “It has deepened inequalities, decimated economies [and] plunged millions into extreme poverty.”

The virus was also on the minds of the leaders who addressed the General Assembly Thursday — particularly the African leaders, who made up a large portion of the day’s speakers. Many appeared by video message because of the pandemic.

“It is an indictment on humanity that more than 82% of the world’s vaccine doses have been acquired by wealthy countries, while less than 1% has gone to low-income countries,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a video address.

The African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 4% of Africa’s population is fully vaccinated.

“The hoarding and inequitable distribution with the resultant uneven vaccination patterns across the globe is not acceptable,” Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said in a prerecorded message. “Vaccine nationalism is self-defeating and contrary to the mantra that ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe.’ Whether in the global North or South, rich or poor, old or young, all people of the world deserve access to vaccines.”

There was also concern about the trend toward coups in Africa. In the past year, military coups have taken place in Chad, Mali and Guinea. Sudan’s military said it put down an attempted coup there just this week. In Tunisia, some argue that President Kais Saied essentially pulled off a coup, invoking emergency powers, firing the prime minister and suspending the parliament to consolidate his authority.

Angolan President João Gonçalves Lourenço said there has not been sufficient reaction from other countries to discourage these coups.

“We consider it necessary that the international community act with resolve and does not simply issue statements of condemnation in order to force those actors to return power to the legitimately established institutions,” he told the gathering. “We cannot continue to allow recent examples, such as those of Guinea and others, to succeed in Africa and other continents.”

In the Middle East, Iraqi President Barham Salih expressed concern about terrorism in his country and the wider region.

“We cannot understate the danger posed by terrorism. If we become lax and distracted by regional conflicts, we will simply see the return of obscurantist forces that will threaten our people and our security,” he said. “Cooperation and solidarity are our only choice in our fight against international terrorism and the groups that support it.”

Other speakers Thursday included Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

Reconciliation

Meanwhile, the opportunities provided this week for intensive diplomacy helped ease a rare rift in U.S.-French relations.

French officials were outraged by a security pact made between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States earlier this month. Under the arrangement, Australia will receive at least eight nuclear-powered submarines, to be built in Australia using American technology. The agreement came as Australia pulled out of an earlier deal for French submarines worth tens of billions of dollars.

A phone meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday and an in-person meeting Thursday between their top diplomats on the margins of the General Assembly in New York appear to have gone a long way to calming Paris and rebuilding confidence.

Some information in this report came from the Associated Press. 

 
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