It appears Secretary of State Katie Hobbs may have been punked this week after repeatedly using social media to denigrate Senate President Karen Fann and audit contractor Cyber Ninjas.
Hobbs, a Democrat is who Arizona’s top elected elections official, has taken to referring to the Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 General Election results as #FraudIt. She has also suggested during media interviews that the audit is a joke or political theater.
On Tuesday, Hobbs took to the official Twitter account for her office to announce audit observers from her staff “discovered” a WiFi router connected to one of the audit servers located on the floor of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum where the audit is being conducted.
Hobbs went so far as to claim it was impossible to ensure voter data had not been somehow compromised, although Hobbs provided no scientific support for her claim.
The @ArizonaAudit Twitter account explained that no wireless was ever enabled, something audit officials also explained to Hobbs’ observers. The auditors then offered to provide Hobbs with “all passwords and access needed for a forensic investigation of the router” to confirm the safety of voter data.
And that, according to an audit insider, was intended to punk -or trick- Hobbs due to her lack of support for the auditors seeking to review the sanctity and security of the routers used by Maricopa County’s Elections Department.
“The response on the floor about the ‘discovered’ router was open and transparent, 180 from the secretive position taken by Maricopa County. The Secretary thinks it’s o.k. to check our router logs so she should be o.k. with us checking out the county’s routers. But she rushed in without any thought about the precedence she was setting. The pinkos walked right into it,” the insider said.
Pinkos is a nickname given by audit staff and volunteers to Hobbs’s observers who are required to wear dark pink shirts when on the audit floor.
Hobbs’ recent comments suggesting malfeasance by the Senator or its auditors has drawn the ire of Tyler Bowyer, a Republican Party national committeeman. In a tweet Wednesday afternoon, Bowyer called for holding accountable any elected official “who perpetuates substantiated or false election audit claims…for or against the audit.”