Trump Presses the Gas on 2020 Claims in Arizona

"Take your loss and accept it and move on." Such was the advice Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs doled out to Donald Trump on Friday ahead of his Saturday appearance in Phoenix, reports the Guardian. He didn't take it. At the "Rally for Election Integrity," the Hill reports Trump kicked things off by thanking the "brave and unyielding conservative warriors in the Arizona State Senate" for their running audit of the Maricopa County election results. Politico reports that at his first rally in the state since he was on the campaign trail, the former president gave oxygen to claims made last week by the state Senate’s auditors, the Cyber Ninjas, about the Maricopa County 2020 vote, which went to Biden.

• AZCentral shares one: "74,000 mail-in ballots were counted with no clear record of them being sent,” Trump said. "Nobody knows where the hell they are." Except county elections officials say that's not so, and that the Cyber Ninjas simply misunderstood the county's two-file record-keeping system for early ballots.

• The AP has another: "There were 18,000 people who voted in Arizona in 2020 who were then purged from the rolls immediately after the election," said Trump. The AP says Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan previously made that claim, but it just isn't so. The total removed was 13,320, and that happened over two months in a typical manner, with voting rolls updated to reflect voters who moved out of the county or died between Election Day, and Jan. 2. That added up to 7,916 people. Another 5,404 people were dropped for other reasons, including felony convictions.
• Politico flags what it calls a "bizarre" claim. While applauding the audit, he said this: "I’m hearing Texas wants to do a forensic audit." Except Trump won Texas with 52% of the vote.

(More President Trump stories.)