Having exhausted their legal maneuvers in Maricopa County Arizona to stop the audit of the 2020 presidential election, Democrats have unleashed the big dogs at the US Justice Department to attack audit procedures and security.

In a three-page letter sent to Sen. Karen Hann, the GOP Arizona Senate President, Pamela Karlan, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division at the US Justice Department expressed concerns over how the investigation is being handled.

Mind you this is the same Civil Rights Division that has turned a blind eye to American citizens who have been unlawfully detained or raided by the FBI just because they were in Washington, DC on Jan. 6 —not necessarily at the Capitol—and are still being denied bond.

The same Justice Department that has put American citizens who were in Washington, DC on Jan. 6 on a no-fly list because of their politics and testified in an April 29 House hearing on combating extremism and domestic terrorism that Trump supporters are extremist.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s national security division, Brad Wiegmann, said during the hearing:

“While the department has been successful using existing laws to fight domestic terrorism – including bringing charges for offenses involving weapons or explosives violations, hate crimes and arson, there have been more than 430 arrests made in connection with the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol “carried out by extremist supporters of then-President Donald Trump.”

And it is the same Justice Department that perpetuated the Russian Collusion hoax and allowed the FISA courts to be weaponized for political purposes by the Obama administration.

According to her own letter, Karlan is basing her “concerns” on news reports and complaints, citing more than once the notoriously inaccurate Washington Post as a source.

“The Department has reviewed available information, including news reports and complaints regarding the procedures being used for the this audit,” said Karlan.

Considering the state of the American media, this in itself is alarming.

According to azcentral, “The department’s concerns may have been prompted in part by a letter it received Thursday from three organizations, including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, asking the department to dispatch federal monitors to oversee the audit. ”

The Leadership Conference touts itself as, “The nation’s most effective organizations in advocating for progressive [my emphasis] civil and human rights policies.”

The group recently advocated for President Trump to be permanently banned from Facebook and urged the Senate not to pass the Extending Temporary Emergency Scheduling of Fentanyl Analogues Act because it attaches punitive punishments that may harm brown people.

Lest anyone think that the Democrats are not just employing the media to attack the audit, more than a dozen big-money progressive organizations are seeking to weaponize the DOJ.

The Brennan Center for Justice sent a formal complaint to Sen. Fann that was also signed by The Carter Center, R Street Institute, Arizona Citizens Clean Eletions Protect Democracy, Sandra Day O’Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary, Common Cause and the Common Cause Education Fund, Verified Voting, RSM Election Solutions, a Homeland Security senior cyber security advisor, the National Vote at Home Institute, the Elections Group, Democracy fund Voice, Harvard Kennedy school, MIT and Rice University.

Karlan states in her letter to Sen. Fann that there are two issues of potential noncompliance, citing first the 1960 Civil Rights Act:

“The statute requires state and local election officials to maintain, for twenty-two months after the conduct of an election for federal office, ‘all records and papers’ relating to any ‘act requisite to voting in such election’…The purpose of these federal preservation and retention requirements for election records is to ‘secure a more effective protection of the right to vote.’”

But the Arizona GOP audit isn’t about voting or civil rights, it’s about voting integrity. On its face, this objection is not only weak on the merits, it just plays into the progressive woke narrative that minorities are routinely intimidated in American elections.

Karlan says the Department’s second concern is that election officials are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and that the election records are at risk of “damage or loss.”

“If the state designates some other custodian for such election records, then the Civil Rights Act provides that the ‘duty to retain and preserve any record or paper so deposited shall devolve upon such custodian…if the state places such records in the custody of other officials, then the Department views the Act as requiring that ‘administrative procedures be in place giving election officers ultimate management authority over the retention and security of those election records, including the right to physically access  the records.”

This sweeping view of the Civil rights Act is incompatible with the very idea of the physical records being preserved for such a purpose as an actual audit, where possible election fraud is alleged.

Karlan also took issue in her letter with the statement of work submitted by Cyber Ninjas, saying that they would be knocking on doors to confirm if valid voters actually lived at stated addresses. Karlan interpreted this as voter intimidation.

But one must wonder why the DOJ isn’t concerned with poll officials covering windows in Detroit with cardboard in order to keep poll watchers from actually witnessing the vote count.

One must also wonder why Karlan isn’t concerned about the intimidation tactics that audit workers are experiencing as reported on by Ken Bennett, the Arizona Audit Director, to The Gateway Pundit:

“We’ve had the press and the media taking pictures of people’s license plates and trying to get closeups on their name badges and faces, of course. So it makes the workers and the observers a little bit nervous when the press is going to that length to try to identify somebody. They’re afraid they’re going to be doxxed or something like that. So we hope that doesn’t happen and we hope that everybody will be a little bit bigger than that.”

Regardless of the DOJ’s involvement with the audit, ballot security and voter privacy is now essentially a moot point. The Arizona Democratic Party and other critics of the audit reached a settlement Wednesday in a lawsuit with top Republican legislators that will guarantee ballot security and voter privacy will be upheld. The settlement will also allow observers and reporters to witness the process.

Biden’s DOJ needs to be put back on its leash and allow the audit to continue without further delay tactics.  The continuing political weaponization of the DOJ should scare the hell out of all Americans that we are creating our own national Gestapo.