Vice News reports:

For months now, we all thought we knew that the bogus Arizona audit was a clown show. But a new data dump of more than 22,000 emails, texts, and documents show just how wild it really was.

On Tuesday the Arizona Senate finally complied with a court order to hand over its private communications with the people involved in running the audit. The massive trove includes communications that suggest former President Trump wanted to fund it, that Trump’s allies were involved from the start, and that conspiracy theorists involved in the recount worried about threats from antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Oh, and workers were paid as much as $125 an hour.

The Senate was forced to hand over the documents following a public records lawsuit brought by American Oversight, a group of former Obama administration officials set up to investigate the Trump administration.

But the Senate has withheld 2,500 of the most sensitive documents, citing legislative and attorney-client privilege, which include almost all direct communications with Cyber Ninjas and its CEO Doug Logan.

The bogus recount began in April and was expected to take 16 days to complete. In the end the recount didn’t finally finish until late July. The report was due to be presented to the Senate last week, but it’s been delayed for at least several more weeks after Logan and several colleagues contracted COVID-19.

The recount, conducted despite several previous audits showing no widespread voter fraud in Maricopa County, has become a lightning rod for Republicans and conspiracy theorists across the country who believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. [Continue reading…]