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May
15
2021

Circling the Wagons
James Howard Kunstler

Perhaps Arizona can adopt California’s new minority-friendly math curriculum before the election audit ordered by the Arizona State Senate is completed in a month or two. Under that new system of math, or maff, two plus two doesn’t equal four, it equals more, five plus five equals a lot more, and 1,672,143 minus X equals don’t-bother-me-with-your-racist-numbers.

It’ll take some kind of math or maff to unravel the mystery of Arizona’s 2020 election results, and the people who run Maricopa County — that is, Phoenix and its suburban asteroid belt, or about 60 percent of the AZ population — don’t want that mystery solved. So, they are not responding to a court-ordered subpoena to produce the evidence, namely, the vote tabulation files from their Dominion Systems voting machines, the county’s server routers, or the chain-of-custody records of the precinct batches of paper ballots. The county’s servers indicate that the folder containing the database of election results was deleted sometime after the election, so the county has no record of the vote. Hmmmm….

By a previous subpoena, the state Senate took possession of 2.1 million ballots and nearly 400 Dominion election machines and turned them over to the company, Cyber Ninjas, hired to do the audit. Problem was, the county didn’t hand over the passwords to the Dominion machines. Officials claim they never had the passwords, which suggests that the County Board of Elections never had control over their own elections, for which they are legally responsible. A curious situation, because the county says it conducted a previous examination of its voting machines weeks after the election. How’d they do that without the Dominion passwords?

Maybe the data was not stored on the Dominion machines but booted onto external hard drives, which would be against the rules. Or maybe the Dominion machines were connected to the Internet and information was booted into the Dominion machines from somewhere else on Planet Earth. That would be very very against the rules. If that was so, the log files on the machines would show time-stamps and where the outside information originated. Would that be enough for the State Senate to de-certify the Arizona election results? Or Prompt audits in other states where the outcome is still contested: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin?

An awful lot of interested parties don’t want a complete examination of the 2020 Arizona vote to go forward, including now the US Department of Justice, which sent a letter from its Civil Rights Division to state Senate President Karen Fann threatening legal action against canvassers directed to ascertain whether voters actually lived at the addresses recorded on their mail-in ballots.  The DOJ asserts that this would be threatening and coercive to voters — if they could even be found at these addresses. That was a week ago. So far, the auditors have not sent canvassers out and the DOJ hasn’t moved.

However, the DOJ is beefing up its home office defenses by appointing one Susan Hennessey to its National Security Division and one Lisa Monaco as Deputy Attorney General, assigned to run the little twerp in the corner office, Merrick Garland. Do they sense something coming at them… some possibly lethal threat that must be met with a rabid counterattack? Hennessey was general counsel of the Lawfare Institute, the gang of attorneys who coordinated with the DOJ, FBI, and The New York Times in the RussiaGate campaign, the subsequent Mueller Investigation, and the shenanigans surrounding “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella and IC Insepector General Michael Atkinson in the first Trump impeachment. Lisa Monaco was special counsel to Robert Mueller when he was FBI Director and previously head of the DOJ national Security Division. Earlier, she was on the DOJ task force that was cited for prosecutorial misconduct in the Enron case. She’s the kind of lawyer Shakespeare was talking about in Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV.

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr is reportedly ramping up an indictment of Donald Trump on financial fraud charges. He’s been dicking around on this for years. Do you wonder why he picked this moment to move? Pinning a felony conviction charge on the former president would be just the ticket for negating any undesirable outcome of the Maricopa County election audit, and any other formal inquiries in other states over the 2020 election. They don’t call it lawfare for nothing. The problem with that is ultimately you may be using the law to disable and defeat itself. You could say that that these smoothies have just about succeeded in doing that. We are a country so far down the path to self-destruction, that the truth has been declared an enemy of the people.

 

 

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

 

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