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April 1, 2022 - Epoch Times
22:04
AZ Attorney General Issues Criminal Referral of Secretary of State for Possible Election Crimes
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This is your Daily Facts Matter Update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times.
And now, since the midterm elections are coming up so very, very soon, let's focus today's discussion on how states are working to keep the ballot box secure.
Meaning, let's focus on the topic of election integrity.
And let's begin the discussion over in the state of Arizona.
And to start with, just yesterday, the governor of Arizona signed into law a new bill which requires voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship in order to vote in presidential elections or to vote by mail.
Specifically, the bill which just became law, which officially is called House Bill 2892, it requires voters in the state of Arizona to provide both a proof of citizenship as well as proof of residency in order to be eligible to vote in either a presidential election or to be able to vote by mail.
And then furthermore, this new law sets up penalties for election officials who fail to comply.
That's because under this new piece of legislation, if a county recorder is found to have knowingly accepted a voter registration application, which does not have sufficient proof of citizenship, he or she faces a Class 6 felony.
Now, it requires a bit of explanation as to how exactly this new law fits within the context of the existing laws currently on the books over in Arizona.
And in order to explain it, let's start with this letter here from Doug Ducey, who is the governor of Arizona, and he wrote this letter to the current Secretary of State.
Here's what it says, quote, Arizona law prohibits non-citizens from voting for all state and local offices and requires proof of citizenship.
HB 2492 provides clarity to Arizona law on how officials process federal form voter registration applications that lack evidence of citizenship.
What he wrote in this letter is, in fact, rather accurate.
Because you see, back in 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, which requires people to provide proof of citizenship in order to vote in state elections.
However, nine years after that, in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Arizona could not impose their citizenship requirement on federal-only elections.
Meaning that Arizona could continue requiring proof of citizenship in its state elections, but they must also accept federal forms to register Arizonians to vote in federal elections without requiring proof of citizenship.
And on those federal forms, there is a question which asks voters whether they are or not a U.S. citizen, but those forms do not require proof of citizenship, meaning you can just check yes without showing any kind of proof.
And so you see, since the year 2013, meaning that for the last nine years or so, there's been a unique situation in the state of Arizona, where in order to vote in state elections, you do need to show proof of citizenship, but in order to vote in federal elections, you actually don't.
However, now, with the passage of House Bill 2492, voters will need to show proof of citizenship in order to vote in all federal presidential elections as well.
And according to Mr.
Jake Hoffman, who is a state lawmaker who sponsored this bill, he says that the way that the bill is worded will in fact stand up to legal scrutiny.
Here's specifically what he said in a statement just yesterday.
Quote, Quote, I'm confident that should Democrats challenge HB 2492 in court, it will only serve to further reinforce its clear constitutionality.
And it's worth noting that this has been a growing area of concern within the state of Arizona for a while now.
Because you see, in 2014, when this dual system was first set up by that Supreme Court decision, there were only 21 people who voted without having shown a proof of citizenship.
However, by the year 2020, that number went all the way up to 11,600.
11,600 people who voted in the presidential election without ever having shown proof of citizenship.
However, that number does not actually take into account the people in the state who are registered to vote, but who happen to not vote in the year 2020.
Here's in fact what Governor Doug Ducey's office said on this point.
In Maricopa County alone, there are currently 13,042 active registered voters who have not provided evidence of citizenship to vote through the use of the federal form.
And indeed, aside from just Maricopa County, according to the official state records, there are currently 31,500 registered voters throughout all of Arizona who have never shown a proof of U.S. citizenship.
However, with the passage of this new bill, well, they will now be forced to.
But not everyone is pleased with this new development.
For instance, Ms.
Katie Hobbs, who is currently the Arizona Secretary of State, but she's also running for the governorship as a Democrat, she took to Twitter to tag this new law.
Saying this, quote, Now initially, I did not quite understand what she was referring to, meaning why showing proof of citizenship is an unnecessary barrier.
And so in order to understand her statement, I looked up different people's reactions to this bill, and I found one from Mr.
Alex Gulotta, who is the Arizona director of an organization called All Voting is Local, and here's specifically what he told CNN, quote, However, regardless of the criticism, barring any successful legal challenge, this law will be in effect come the 2024 presidential race.
Now, I want to switch gears just a little bit and discuss something else regarding election integrity happening in the state of Arizona.
And that is the fact that just two days ago, the Arizona Attorney General filed a criminal referral against Ms.
Katie Hobbs, who is again the Secretary of State for allegedly committing election crimes.
Now, what happened specifically was that on Tuesday of this week, meaning just three days ago, Mr. Mark Brunovich, who is the current Attorney General of Arizona, he sent this letter right here to a county attorney delegating his powers to that attorney in order to launch a criminal probe into whether Ms. Katie Hobbs broke the law.
Here's specifically what this letter says, quote, I'm writing to delegate my powers as Arizona Attorney General to you to investigate and take any appropriate enforcement actions, civil and criminal, regarding the Secretary of State taking down the online EQUAL system beginning on or about March 17, 2022.
Now, the specific crime that Ms.
Hobbs is being accused of is intentionally shutting down the online candidate petition portal within the state of Arizona.
And in case you happen to not live in the state of Arizona, this requires a little bit of background.
You see, according to Arizona state law, the Secretary of State's office must maintain an online election portal.
Here's specifically what the Arizona state law says in this regard.
Essentially, it's an online portal where candidates for different offices throughout the state can gather signatures for their nominating petitions.
However, despite prior warnings from the Attorney General's office, who warned Ms.
Katie Hobbs several times about how it would be illegal for her to shut down part of this online system, well, she did it anyway.
Despite the warnings, on March 17th, which was about two weeks ago now, Ms.
Ms. Katie Hobbs disabled a section for legislative and congressional candidates, even though those candidates' April 4th deadline for signatures was fast approaching.
Meaning that for the last two weeks, only candidates for statewide office, like Ms. Katie Hobbs herself, were able to use the online portal, whereas candidates for legislative as well as congressional seats were not.
Now, Ms. Katie Hobbs described this as a temporary shutdown, which was necessary to update some of the data in the system.
That's because she said that this year, meaning 2022, Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission, they drew new lines for both legislative as well as congressional candidates.
And therefore, Ms.
Hobbs said that this change required her to take the system offline to account for the new districts.
This was she claimed due to the fact that the voter registration system, this online portal, which determines if the signers live within the district of the candidates that they're supporting, cannot actually accommodate more than one set of maps.
And therefore, the system was temporarily not available for those running for either Congress or the legislature, even though it did remain accessible for candidates seeking statewide office because they were not affected by redistricting.
However, as Ms.
Katie Hobbs was preparing to take the system offline, the Arizona Assistant Attorney General, well, they wrote her a warning saying that such an action would be contrary to law.
In that letter, the Assistant Attorney General floated the possibility of Ms.
Hobbs being charged with a Class 3 misdemeanor for knowingly refusing to perform a duty required under state election laws.
And then furthermore, critics argue that the timing as well as the length of this change was rather alarming, giving the close proximity to the election deadline as well as the general importance of the looming midterms.
And now Mr.
Mark Brunovich has officially delegated his authority to a county attorney in order to investigate this matter and see if any laws were actually broken.
Here's again what part of this letter says, quote, it is a class three misdemeanor for a public officer upon whom a duty is imposed by title 16 of the Arizona revised statuses to knowingly fail or refuse to perform that duty in the manner prescribed by law.
The attorney general's office received multiple written complaints after March 17, 2022, when the secretary of state took down the equal system for congressional and legislative candidates.
Our office will also forward to you the materials from Hobbs versus Brunovich case in Maricopa County Superior Court.
Although, frankly, having read through both sides of the argument, as well as the actual documents, it seems like the law in question, for some reason, just does not accommodate for redistricting because it does not seem that miscathed.
Katie Hobbs had any other choice, but it'll be up to this attorney to decide whether that was the case or not.
Regardless, if you'd like to read more about this particular case or about this new law in Arizona, which now requires people to show proof of citizenship in order to vote in the presidential race, I'll throw all those links into the description box below this video for you to check out.
And all I ask in return is that you take a super quick moment to smash, smash, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
And now, let's switch gears just a little bit.
Since we were talking about showing U.S. citizenship in order to vote, let's talk about illegal immigration at the U.S. southern border.
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Well, I was down in Florida about three weeks ago now.
I had the unique opportunity to sit down and speak with Miss Vicky Richter, who is an independent war correspondent, and we discussed the alarming scenes that she both witnessed and documented at the U.S. southern border.
Take a listen.
So, I'm an independent war correspondent, journalist, and I was, I'm a veteran, a German Special Forces Bundeswehr Army soldier, and...
Yes, now I work as a journalist in America at the southern border and I report about the topic child trafficking and human trafficking.
So let's start at the very beginning.
So what made you or what drove you to join the special forces in Germany?
Was it something that you just wanted to do or was there like a story behind that?
Actually, I always wanted to do serving my country, and I'm a patriot, and I really love my country.
And I wanted to give something back, because I'm a refugee from eastern Germany.
Before the wall came down, my mom saved us, me and my brother, to come to Bavaria.
And I was so grateful to grow up in Bavaria, in a free country.
And I just wanted to serve my country, and yeah...
The Bundeswehr, the German army, thought, okay, she could be very good at PSYOPs, so they put me in the PSYOPs Special Forces Unit, and yeah, I learned in this eight and a half years a lot about propaganda, sabotages.
Now I know that we now live in a propaganda war.
It's actually a media war.
So maybe before we get into even some of your war correspondent work, can you give us an idea of, so you just said we're living in a propaganda war.
Can you give us a breakdown, a little bit, like maybe some example of that?
So every time when the whole countries in the world say the same thing, you should be curious about that because this actually doesn't happen.
So everyone talks about this crisis, COVID, this super dangerous virus, and they only use the fear.
So they have the pictures with all the corpses.
So in Italy, we had the scene with the corpses on trucks.
And they only said, okay, the old people all died on COVID, but the real problem was it's not normal in Italy to burn corpses.
So they couldn't put them in the ground because they didn't have any space.
And it was not normal to burn them.
So they just put them on military tracks and then they made the picture and said, oh, look, everyone is dying.
Or in America it was with New York with the tents.
So they just use fear and everyone has fear about dying.
So this is a big power what the media has.
And...
The normal way to make a war is sending troops or soldiers anywhere, but this is not now.
So they just made a war against us with the media.
So the media is not media anymore, it's actually the propaganda unit of the global government.
So then let's switch gears a little bit and talk about your journalist work.
So you told me prior to the interview that you go very often to the U.S. southern border.
Why are you choosing to go there rather than other places?
So I'm very focused on the topic child trafficking and human trafficking because I think this is the real pandemic.
We have a pandemic and the real pandemic is child and human trafficking and fentanyl drug smuggling into America.
And nobody's talking about that.
We have this problem since decades.
And nobody's publishing it.
Nobody's talking about it.
And I think these children are only tools for evil people to get used, to get raped, to get killed for fun from crazy, sick elites.
And I think that's what we have to change.
Because you get a bunch of money if selling a child.
So if you just close your border...
You would help Mexico with the border problem because there's no reason to go to America because it's closed.
And America doesn't have the problem to deal with illegals anymore.
So you can stop a bunch of problems if you just close your border.
And that's why I want to report about it.
And I started investigating that even in Germany.
So this whole child trafficking and human trafficking is not only in America.
It's all over the world.
But now I'm in America because I left my country and I really want to help America understanding what's the real problem.
So what have you seen?
So you started going to the border how long ago?
So I started going to the border in November last year, and I saw a lot of things.
So in November I was in Arizona, in Pima County, actually on a really, really small spot at the wall, and they only have five holes, so really five holes or gaps in this wall, in this small area, and I saw in 10 days 87 children.
Without adults.
They just were dumped in the desert.
And Border Patrol had to go out at 4 o'clock in the morning, processing 87 children.
And in this time, this is what I found out, is that the cartels, the so-called coyotes, go through another hole and bring all the fentanyl, the guns, and the criminals in your country.
So actually, this whole child trafficking is there for two points.
It's for...
Getting drugs into your country, because Border Patrol is distracted, and for getting the elites or all sick pedophiles their toys.
Sorry for saying toys, but I can't just...
I think it's toys.
It's a fleas market, and even the coyotes, they don't think about, oh, this is a human being.
No, that's a job.
So I bring one thing to another point.
So how do you...
I think that dropping a child off and having him cross the border, the border patrol picks them up.
What happens to that child afterward that you're saying that they're being used by the elites as these, you know, as you said, toys?
Like, what's the process like?
Do you know?
So what I found out is that the Border Patrol brings them to the facilities, and all of the children have paperwork with them.
So there are some sponsors, they're called sponsors, with a phone number, and they are in Florida, they are in Missouri, they are in Montana, they are everywhere in your country.
So Border Patrol is calling them, and Border Patrol has one particular number.
So the sponsor knows, oh, Border Patrol from Pima County is calling, so my...
This person, my child, is here.
So I'm getting on the phone and I'm very nice.
He said, yes, I'm the cousin.
I know this person.
So I did a thing that we called this number of the sponsor and this sponsor freaked out because he didn't saw the Border Patrol number.
It's also a random number from...
Somewhere, because it was my phone number.
They didn't know it.
So they were really angry to this child.
They said, we don't know you.
Who are you?
Who are you?
Why do you call us?
Don't call us again.
So if I would be a sponsor, and this would be my cousin, I would know how old she is.
I would know what the name is, and I would know where she's coming from.
And this person didn't know that.
So you really know, okay, when this happens, this child will end up in a child trafficking circle.
And Border Patrol, you can't blame them because the biggest problem of Border Patrol is now that actually only one-third of Border Patrol is really working at the border.
One third is playing babysitter at the facilities, and the other third is just losing their jobs because of getting the forced vaccine.
So this is a made-up problem.
But it's not only a made-up problem from the government right now.
Because when you see at the wall, the holes are there since a Republican governor is sitting in Arizona or in Texas.
And okay, maybe he just don't see it, but I don't believe that because these holes are very tactical.
So when you go there with a military background, you see those holes, and you just go randomly straight through the desert, 11 miles, you end up in a refugee camp from the Catholic Church.
And in this refugee camp, there was no children.
There were only those coyotes, the criminals.
So you see even the Catholic Church is supporting them.
And then the biggest question is why doesn't go there a sheriff when even all the landowners The property owners say, hey, there's something criminal there.
Can you just check that up?
And the sheriff says, we can't go there.
We need a warrant from the attorney general.
And only the FBI can go there.
So these are questions I'm asking myself.
How does this work in a state from a Republican governor who actually says, oh, border safety is my most important focus?
Besides that example you gave of watching within a few days 83 children cross into those holes, can you give the audience some other examples of what you saw during your time there?
So, when I was with Mark Lambs, American Sheriff, he gave me the opportunity, the chance to go with his K9 unit one shift.
And we saw, and Penel County is not directly at the border, so this is the highway from the border...
To Tucson, to Phoenix, and there is the most drug and child trafficking.
So when the child traffickers got children order drugs, they have to drive it on this highway.
So the K9 unit is patrolling there, and I joined them, and we found a whole tire.
With drugs.
So we had to cut the tire off and then you saw the drugs.
So this is how they smuggled fentanyl.
And what we also saw was a normal pickup truck, a Ford, with a blanket on.
And we stopped it and you saw a little bit of waving in the blankets.
And then Border Patrol opened up the blanket and there were seven people on it.
Actually a mission what you can't win.
When you don't bring more people at the border and that's why I don't understand that America has so much interest going to Ukraine and saving borders when they can't even save their own borders.
Because you don't have a country when you don't have a safe border.
Now, if you'd like to watch the full uncensored cut of that interview, as well as a plethora of other phenomenal content, you can do so over on Epic TV, which is our awesome no-censorship video platform.
I'll throw a link to Epic TV. It'll be right there at the very top of the description box.
And again, if you use promo code Roman, you can get a 14-day free trial.
That way, you can check out all the great content down there without paying a single dime for two full weeks.
And then afterwards, you can decide whether you want to continue or not, but you are under no obligation to do so.
Again, that link will be right there at the very top of the description box, and just use promo code Roman.
And until next time, I'm your host, Roman, from The Epoch Times.
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