them from self-incrimination. paula reid, cnn, washington. ron brownstein is a cnn senior political analyst and senior editor at the atlantic. good to see you, ron. we have to start with this sham arizona recount. joe biden ended up getting more votes, but what are your thoughts on all of that? and importantly the fact that republicans in other states want to go down the same sham audit road. it really does seem like a strategy. it is. and, look, that s the right word for it. this whole process was a sham from beginning to end. and even though it underscored biden s victory in arizona, it really had no capacity to confirm it because it wasn t like a serious investigation. what it was, i think, clearly from the point of view of the sponsors was a pretext to both sow doubt in the election process and thus seed the ground for trump if he runs again in 2024 to make similar claims of fraud as he did in 2020, but also to provide the pretext for