There is plenty of distortion to push back against. The county supervisors and the Maricopa County election officials are not showing themselves in a positive light by releasing carefully parsed statements that seem designed to mislead people and result in media soundbites intended to disparage the audit.
As but one example, the county election officials stated that they didn't delete the election files, but paragraphs later in their report they say that:
In accordance with the standard database archival processes, the data files (MDF file type) were moved to a backup hard drive in February to ensure the server had sufficient space to perform the statutory mandated March Jurisdictional Election. When this occurred, the SQL Log Files (LDF file type) demanded by the Subpoena were retained on the primary server. These files were not removed and were stored on the server when it was provided to the Senate on 4/21/2021.
Source: Maricopa County Report
Apparently even though "moving" a file from a server to a separate backup drive results in the file being marked as deleted on the original server, the Maricopa County elections people thought they should loudly announce that they didn't delete the file, and try to ridicule the people who pointed out that the file apparently had been deleted from the server.
It seems like they are parsing the difference between moving something from a disk drive so it is no longer present on the disk drive with deleting something from a disk drive so that it is no longer present on the disk drive.
*bump*
I’ll buy the ‘we had to clear the table...’ argument for the moment. So why didn’t you inform the audit team that you had done so?
If you scream bloody murder about someone auditing your election, something is wrong with your election. And you know it.
How small are these drives?
We can buy SSDs that hold 8 terabytes .. solves the space and speed problem at the same time.
It seems like they are parsing the difference between moving something from a disk drive so it is no longer present on the disk drive with deleting something from a disk drive so that it is no longer present on the disk drive.