Doug Mastriano, the pro-Trump Pennsylvania state legislator who breached the U.S. Capitol Complex on January 6, 2021, is at it again. For those of you unfamiliar with this guy, get up to speed with these pieces/posts:
Who is Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania state senator leading today’s hearing on voter fraud?
Doug Mastriano’s Christian nationalism
Mastriano was part of a delegate of Pennsylvania state legislators who were in Arizona this week to check out the work being done on the bogus election recount conducted by an organization called Cyber Ninjas.
Here is Jonathan Cooper at The Associated Press:
Three Pennsylvania lawmakers were in Arizona on Wednesday to check out the state Senate GOP’s partisan audit of the 2020 election.
They’re the latest Republicans to make a pilgrimage to Phoenix, ground zero in the “stop the steal” movement’s push to find support for conspiracy theories suggesting the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz cheered the audit at a rally just outside Phoenix last month. The next day, several prominent Trump supporters and conspiracy promoters were advertised as speakers at a Phoenix megachurch. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, recently posted a short video of himself at the Arizona Capitol.
Political pilgrimages are nothing new to Arizona, where Republican politicians have long enjoyed photo ops in front of the Mexico border wall. But now, the draw is the Arizona State Fairgrounds, site of a former basketball arena where a Trump supporter who has promoted election conspiracies is overseeing a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County.
The latest visitors are Pennsylvania Sens. Doug Mastriano and Cris Dush, and Rep. Rob Kauffman. They met with Arizona legislators at the Capitol before traveling to the audit site to get a briefing from the auditors.
“We’ll bring the information back to the Senate leadership, we’ll back-brief them on the way ahead and then hopefully we can come up with an approach here to make sure every person in Pennsylvania can rest assured they have one vote and it counts,” Mastriano told a radio host from WEEO-FM.
The Pennsylvania lawmakers and others in their delegation spent about 20 minutes on the arena floor, where volunteers counted and photographed ballots. Doug Logan, the head of Cyber Ninjas, the firm leading the audit, led them around.
Afterward, Mastriano spoke to conservative media outlets but ignored journalists from the Associated Press and other mainstream news sources.
Asked by a reporter if he wants to see the Arizona audit replicated in Pennsylvania, Dush said, “Without question. Absolutely.”
Read the rest here.
For the record, in the 2020 presidential election, held seven months ago, Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes.
Mastriano was at the capitol on January 6 with Doug Saccone, another guy we have covered at this blog. See our posts here and here.
