How a Trump ally got his unfounded voting-machine audit push in front of federal cyber agency
Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem made an unusual request in the waning days of the former president’s term, according to emails shared with POLITICO.
Donald Trump’s top pick to administer Arizona elections in 2024 is more than a garden-variety backer — he played a little-known but notable role in bolstering the former president’s push to subvert the 2020 ballot.
It was the waning weeks of the Trump presidency when Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem made an unusual request of the federal agency that deals with cybersecurity threats. Finchem, a longstanding Trump ally now running for Arizona secretary of state, asked the Department of Homeland Security agency to conduct “a full spectrum forensic examination” of voting machines.
Finchem’s request was elevated to the acting director of DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Brandon Wales, at 7:59 a.m. on Christmas Eve 2020. And it got his attention. “We need to do a call on this today,” Wales wrote to several people eight minutes later, including the agency’s then-deputy chief external affairs officer.
The emails to the DHS agency, known as CISA, are part of a tranche of new communications that show Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his allies’ attempts to get the federal government to help them reverse election results went even broader than previously known. American Oversight, a watchdog group, obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and shared them with POLITICO.
Perhaps even more significantly, the emails underscore that Trump’s stalwart allies in his baseless quest to contest his loss to Joe Biden are still core parts of his network heading into a possible 2024 White House bid. Finchem, in particular, worked overtime in the weeks after the 2020 election to try to reverse Biden’s win in his swing state. And last September, Trump endorsed his bid to become Arizona’s secretary of state, in charge of its 2024 ballot.
During the last days of Trump’s administration, Finchem was one of the leading proponents of “auditing” voting machines — and hosted an infamous hearing with Giuliani in late November 2020 where then-President Trump called in to lie about his loss. Emails reviewed by POLITICO show Finchem asking for help from one of CISA’s Hunt and Incident Response Teams, saying a subcontractor to one of the nation’s largest defense contractors could help.
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Donald Trump’s top pick to administer Arizona elections in 2024 is more than a garden-variety backer — he played a little-known but notable role in bolstering the former president’s push to subvert the 2020 ballothttps://t.co/7O45hketGT
— POLITICO (@politico) April 12, 2022
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