kelli ward pac

see trump coup

see az fake electors

see state gop wackos

---

an 9 25

The Arizona Court of Appeals on Monday declined to take up Attorney General Kris Mayes’ appeal of a lower court’s decision to send the Arizona fake electors case back to a grand jury.

In the order, signed by Chief Judge Kent Cattani, the court said the decision was made based on the judges’ discretion.

In April 2024, an Arizona grand jury indicted 18 people for their involvement in efforts to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election after Democrat Joe Biden won the state by around 10,000 votes.

All of the fake electors involved in the scheme were indicted, including Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, former Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern, member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus and Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA CEO.

But in May, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers agreed with arguments from attorneys representing the fake electors that prosecutors had failed to disclose the full text of the Electoral Count Act to the members of the grand jury prior to the indictment. Myers ruled that Mayes would have to convene a new grand jury and share the text of the act in its entirety if she wanted to move forward with the case.

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Instead, Mayes appealed the decision to the Arizona Court of Appeals. Now that the appellate court has declined the case, Mayes’ next steps are either to petition the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse the trial court’s decision or to take the case back to a grand jury.

In response to the Appeals Court’s decision, the Arizona Republican Party issued a statement reiterating a claim from many of the indicted that the case was politically motivated.

“Arizona families deserve an Attorney General who prosecutes criminals, not political opponents,” AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda said in the statement. “Five years later, Kris Mayes is still fixated on 2020 while violent crime, fentanyl trafficking, and border chaos threaten our communities every single day. This obsession is not justice — it’s politics.”

Also among the indicted were Kelli Ward, who led the AZGOP at the time, Gregory Safsten, who was the AZGOP’s executive director, and former Trump staffers and campaign members including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Christina Bobb.

---

All eleven Arizona Republican electors and others sued Governor Doug Ducey on December 2, 2020, in Arizona Federal District Court Case Bowyer v. Ducey, No. CV-20-02321-PHX-DJH. The court dismissed their complaint on December 9, 2020, finding that the plaintiffs' claims, "fail in their particularity and plausibility" and that their '((expert reports' reach implausible conclusions, often because they are derived from wholly unreliable sources." The plaintiffs appealed ...

indictment03

===

Arizona Charges Giuliani and Other Trump Allies in Election Interference Case

Those charged included Boris Epshteyn, a top legal strategist for Donald Trump, and fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf in Arizona after the 2020 election.

By Danny Hakim and Maggie Haberman

Published April 24, 2024

Updated April 25, 2024,

Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election were indicted in Arizona on Wednesday, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf there to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state.

Boris Epshteyn, one of Mr. Trump’s top legal strategists, was also among those indicted, a complication for Mr. Trump’s defense in the criminal trial that began this week in Manhattan over hush money payments made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.

The indictment includes conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges, related to alleged attempts by the defendants to change the 2020 election results. Arizona is the fourth swing state to bring an elections case involving the activities of the Trump campaign in 2020, but only the second after Georgia to go beyond the fake electors whom the campaign deployed in swing states lost by Mr. Trump.

The former president, who is seeking another term, was also named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona case.

“I understand for some of you today didn’t come fast enough, and I know I’ll be criticized by others for conducting this investigation at all,” Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, said in a recorded statement. “But as I have stated before and will say here again today, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined. It’s too important.”

Thumbnail of page 1

Read the Arizona Election Indictment

Arizona on Wednesday indicted Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election, as well as the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state. Here is the indictment.

READ DOCUMENT 58 PAGES

Mr. Giuliani is Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer; Mr. Meadows was the White House chief of staff at the time of the 2020 election. They were among a number of defendants whose names were redacted from the indictment, though it was clear from the context and the descriptions who they were. For example, the passage referencing Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said among other things that he was known as “the mayor.”

A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations

Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.

Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker: Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.

Trump on Trial Newsletter: Sign up here to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

Some parts of the indictment did not refer to Mr. Trump by name, instead referring to the “defendants’ attempts to declare Unindicted Coconspirator 1 and Pence the winners of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Also indicted were Mike Roman, a Trump campaign operative in 2020, John Eastman, an architect of the fake electors plan, and two other lawyers who advised Mr. Trump and his 2020 campaign: Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb.

The indictment lays out a series of alleged efforts by the defendants to overturn Arizona’s election results. They are accused of pressuring “officials responsible for certifying election results to encourage them to change the election results,” including the governor, the legislature and the Maricopa Board of Supervisors.

In all, 35 people who acted as fake electors in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and now Arizona face criminal charges for signing certificates in 2020 falsely stating that Mr. Trump had won their state’s electoral votes.

Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Meadows, Mr. Roman and Mr. Eastman now face charges in two states, Georgia and Arizona. Ms. Ellis has already pleaded guilty to a felony in Georgia.

Among those charged in Arizona are some who served as top Republican Party officials there during the 2020 election, including Kelli Ward, a former state party chairwoman, and Greg Safsten, who at the time was executive director of the state party. Two state senators, Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman, now also face charges.

Some of the people who held themselves out to be Trump electors in states that he lost in 2020 have adamantly insisted that they were acting legally. After Dr. Ward and other fake electors gathered in Phoenix that December, she wrote in a social media post that “we are the electors who represent the legal voters of Arizona!” As recently as late last year, Mr. Kern said that “there’s no such thing as fake electors.”

Late Wednesday, Charles Burnham, a lawyer for Mr. Eastman, said: “The phenomenon of partisan lawfare grows more troubling by the day. Professor Eastman is innocent of criminal conduct in Arizona or any other place and will fight these charges as he has all the other unjust accusations leveled against him.”

Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, said: “The continued weaponization of our justice system should concern every American as it does permanent, irrevocable harm to the country.”

Mr. Hoffman said in a social media post that he was “innocent of any crime,” adding that “I will vigorously defend myself, and I look forward to the day when I am vindicated of this disgusting political persecution.”

Mr. Epshteyn was a constant presence during Mr. Trump’s civil trial in January on charges that he had defamed the New York writer E. Jean Carroll. He joined Mr. Trump at the defense table when Mr. Trump’s lawyer in the case went to the bench for sidebars.

But Mr. Epshteyn has not been in New York for the current criminal case. He has described himself as an “in-house counsel” to Mr. Trump and has been something of a quarterback for the various legal teams working on the former president’s defenses in four criminal cases. He usually speaks with Mr. Trump several times a day.

Mr. Epshteyn has been arrested twice in Arizona over the last 10 years, once in 2014 for assault after a bar fight, in which he pleaded guilty and the conviction was set aside, and again in 2021, after he was accused of inappropriately touching two women. In that case, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, received probation and a fine, and the conviction again was set aside.

Mr. Epshteyn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Election deniers have not fared well at the polls in Arizona, but they maintain a grip on the state’s Republican Party. In January, the party installed a hard-right Trump supporter, Gina Swoboda, as its new leader; Ms. Swoboda runs a nonprofit group that has falsely claimed to have found huge discrepancies in voting records in a number of states. Kari Lake, a fervent backer of Mr. Trump and his false election claims, was the party’s candidate for governor in 2022 (she lost) and is the leading Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat this year.

The Arizona Republican Party, in a statement, called the indictment “a blatant and unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial power, aimed solely at distracting the public” ahead of the 2024 election.

The United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal on Monday that challenged the state’s electronic voting machines. The case was brought by Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, who lost a 2022 race for Arizona secretary of state.

Having slates of people claiming to be electors for Mr. Trump was an integral part of the effort to keep him in office after his loss at the polls in 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies sought to block or delay congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, hoping that Mr. Trump’s allies in the House and Senate might then consider a challenge to the validity of the results in a number of battleground states like Arizona and Michigan — and then accept the pro-Trump electors from those states as valid.

In addition to the state cases, Mr. Trump is facing election interference charges himself in the Georgia case and in a federal case brought by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice.

Mr. Trump has long made a strategy of falsely claiming election fraud. After he was defeated in the 2016 Iowa caucus, he said that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the winner of that contest, “illegally stole it.” And after Mr. Trump received fewer votes nationwide in 2016 than Hillary Clinton did, he said that he had actually won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Faced with criminal charges in the state elections inquiries, some of Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers have backtracked from his 2020 claims.

“Biden was elected, the process was followed,” Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the fake elector plan, told investigators in Michigan last year. Mr. Chesebro has emerged as a key witness in the state prosecutions.

James Renner, a former Michigan state trooper who was a last-minute substitution as a fake elector in that state, expressed regret last year to investigators, saying that he “had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.” Charges against him were dropped as part of a cooperation agreement with the office of Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, a Democrat.

an 3 24

fellow Republican accused former Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward of assault during the state party’s January meeting at a Phoenix church.

According to a police report obtained by the Arizona Mirror, Ward is accused of hitting a woman who criticized Ward’s involvement at the meeting, as she was no longer the party chair.

“I saw (Ward) turn back and lean over the first chair on her right and hit a woman in black with a yellow piece of paper,” a Phoenix police officer wrote in the report after viewing security camera footage from the Dream City Church where the event was being held. “She had the paper in her right hand and hit the woman in her right shoulder. It looked to be a fairly light tap on the video.”

The annual meeting was full of contentious moments as state committee members voted to elect Gina Swoboda to lead the party only days after the former chairman, Jeff DeWitt, resigned amid allegations of bribery by failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Ward was reported to have cut in line and taken a microphone from one attendee’s hand.

Both Ward and the woman involved have different recollections of the incident.

Ward did not return messages seeking comment.

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Laura Schafer, the victim who told police she wants to pursue assault charges, said as Ward walked past her she mentioned to her husband that Ward is no longer the chair, leading to Ward striking her “on the right side of her head and shoulder with both a fist and paper one time.”

Additional witnesses, including Schafer’s husband and Vera Gebran, a former candidate for the legislature, said they’d testify to seeing Ward hit the woman.

Ward told police that she had just finished speaking at the microphone when “a crazy lady started yelling at her” that she was no longer the party chair.

Ward said she “tapped her on the shoulder with a paper” she was holding and that no part of her hand or fist hit the woman. Ward told police that the “tap” was to “emphasize her point” that she was glad she is no longer the chair and denied assaulting the woman.

Police did not see any injuries on Schafer, and she did not report being injured.

The report says that police submitted the report to the Phoenix City Prosecutor’s Office for consideration of assault charges.

Ward was kept in an “isolated part of the church” away from Schafer in order to cast her vote, the report states.

Ward is also facing possible prosecution for her role as a fake elector in the 2020 election.

---

raw 3 24

arizona lawmakers may be on the brink of slapping multiple people linked to Donald Trump's 2020 campaign with criminal charges, according to a new report.

Grand jury subpoenas sent out in recent weeks suggest Attorney General Kris Mayes could soon decide whether to pursue a criminal case against Trump's fake electors in Arizona, Politico reported Wednesday.

The subpoenas constitute "a sharp acceleration of their criminal investigation into efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state," according to the report, based on six anonymous sources.

IFrame Content

The Attorney General's office declined to comment.

"It was not clear whether Mayes is considering charges against people close to Trump’s national campaign," wrote reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney, "or whether her investigation remains focused on the Arizona GOP officials and activists who aided Trump’s bid to overturn the state’s presidential results."

Prominent Arizona Republicans tied to Trump’s post-election efforts include former state GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward as well as state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, both of whom served as fake electors, Politico notes.

News broke in August that Mayes' office would investigate the Trump campaign's post-election actions in Arizona, one of seven lost states Trump tried to reclaim with slates of electors told to submit his name.

Similar efforts in Georgia spurred Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to charge Trump and more than a dozen others with election racketeering.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

j depo mike roman

... ...5th ...A Q It's been reported publicly thatPennsylvania State 3 Senator Doug Mastriano wanted assurances about the plan for the alternate electors to meet and cast votes and wanted to speak 5 directly with Mr. Giuliani to ensure that the plan was legal. 6 Are you aware of any of Senator Mastriano's concerns about the 7 alternate electors? 8 9A Q The Fifth.

It's also been reported that Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and Arizona State Senator Kelly Townsend also had concerns about the alternate electors plan and that, according to an email written by Mr. Chesebro, quote, Ward and Townsend are concerned 13 it could appear treasonous, end quote. 14

Did you ever learn about any concerns that Ms. Ward or 15 Senator Townsend had about the convening of alternate electors 16 in Arizona? 17 18 A The Fifth. Q We go to exhibit No. 18. This is a one-page email -- or 19 one-page exhibit rather, excuse me -- with an email from 20 Mr. Chesebro to you, Mike Roman, as well as Josh Findlay on 21 Saturday, December 12th, at 7:12 p.m. Can you see the exhibit 22 we've put up as exhibit 18?

...

Arizona Investigators ‘Aggressively’ Looking at Top Trump Ally Kelli Ward RS 8 23

video fake e sign

https://www.newsweek.com/arizina-gop-kelli-ward-subpoena-signing-electoral-1675706

j6kelliward

file:///C:/Users/patmc/Downloads/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000055538.pdf

:{kolodin assert privs

5th many x}:

The Witness. Yes.

Okay. Thank you.

3 The part of the subpoena that you received from the select committee requires

4 you to produce documents and information, including any electronically stored

5 information.

6 Do you understand that obligation?

7 Mr. Kolodin. I advise my client to assert her Fifth Amendment privilege.

The Witness. I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Q Okay. Dr. Ward, have you reviewed the schedule of requests attached to

11 the subpoena?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Did you conduct a search for records that might be responsive to the

14 schedule attached to the subpoena?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Q Dr. Ward, you've not produced any documents to the select committee that

17 are responsive to the requests attached to the subpoena. Is that correct?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

:{Dr. Ward, do you intend to assert your Fifth Amendment privileges in

response to any further questions that I ask you about the documents, any search or

relevant documents that you discovered that were responsive to the subpoena?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.}:

Okay. Dr. Ward, do you have a Twitter handle?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Okay. We're aware of a Twitter account with the name @kelliwardaz,

1 k-e-I-I-i, w-a-r-d, a-z. Are you the individual that posts through that Twitter account?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Dr. Ward, we're also aware of another Twitter account that posts with the

4 name @AZGOP. Are you an individual with control over posts under that account?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Dr. Ward, can you tell us a little bit about your professional background?

7 Where did you attend undergraduate and graduate education?

A I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Q Did you graduate from:{ Duke University?

A I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Q And medical school at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine -}:-

A I rely on my Fifth --

13 Q Sorry. I was just going to pull it together. And also A.T. Still University in

Arizona?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

:{Dr. Ward, what is your current occupation?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.}:

:{Have you held political office? And, in particular, did you serve as a

member of the Arizona State Senate between 2013 and '15?

2019?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.}:

Have you been chair of the Republican Party of Arizona since approximately

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Dr. Ward, I'd like to ask you some questions today about the 2020 election.

25 I'll refer to it as the Presidential election or the 2020 election,

[very long ...]

Mr. Kolodin. Same advice.

The Witness. I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and attorney-client

3 privilege.

4 BY-

Q I would now like to direct your attention to exhibit No. 11, please.

And if we could scroll down a little bit just to see the caption. That's great.

7 Dr. Ward, this is a complaint filed in the United States District Court for the District

8 of Arizona on December 2nd, 2020. There are several names in the plaintiffs' part of the

9 caption. The last two listed are Kelli Ward and Michael Ward.

10 Are you the same Kelli Ward that filed this complaint in Federal Court?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and on attorney-client privilege.

Okay. And if we could just scroll back up to the top, the very top of the

13 page. There's a signature block there for counsel in that case.

Were you represented by Sidney Powell in this matter?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and attorney-client privilege.

Okay. Dr. Ward, what investigation did you do into the factual basis for the

17 allegations made in this complaint?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and attorney-client privilege.

As was later reported by The Washington Post, you received a cease and

20 desist notice from lawyers representing Dominion. Is that correct?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and attorney-client privilege.

Have you issued any retraction or any other -- of any of the statements that

23 you made regarding Dominion?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and attorney-client privilege.

Okay. I'd now like to direct your attention to exhibit No. 12. These ar but what I mean by t

...[seth keshel; ducey wr have been doing early voting since 1992, check sigs..[shut the hellup?

are you going 5th any q about legislators?]

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Are you aware of whether there was a plan in place as early as

3 September 2020 that involved appointing alternate electors in contested States?

2020?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Who was involved in any such discussions?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Dr. Ward, did you attend a hearing in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 30,

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

What role did Lyle Rapacki play in the Trump campaign's effort to overturn

11 the outcome of the election in Arizona?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Did you play any role in organizing a meeting with State legislative

14 leadership, includin:{g State House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Senate President Karen

Fann, the day after the hearing in Phoenix?}:

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

What was the purpose of this meeting?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

I will now direct your attention to exhibit No. 18.

20 Okay. Exhibit 18 is a tweet by your account, Dr. @KelliWardAZ, retweeting a

21 post dated December 6, 2020, by Christina Bobb.

22 Who is Christina Bobb?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

What role did she play in the Trump campaign's efforts to overturn the

25 outcome of the election in Arizona?...[rusty bowers how become elector?]

ask about names...

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and attorney-client privilege.

What about Mike Roman?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Nick Trainor?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege and attorney-client privilege.

And Boris Epshteyn?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Rudy Giuliani?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Jenna Ellis?

:{I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Bernard Kerik?}:

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Christina Bobb?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

John Eastman?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

Judge James Troupis?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

What about an individual named Kenneth Chesebro?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege as well as attorney-client privilege.

I'm going to direct your attention to exhibit 21, please.

Dr. Ward, this is a memo written by Kenneth Chesebro. The header indicates

24 that it was to Judge James Troupis and dated November 18, 2020. The subject line is

25 "The Real Deadline for Settling a State's Electoral Votes."

:{...[plays video of electos mtg] nancy cottle] duly elected qualified... and sworm"

did you talk about lang contingent?] epoch time interv ant kern]}:

...y on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

On this same day, January 4th, did you participate in a call or a

18 videoconference organized by the Groundswell coalition?

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

:{This is a call that occurred on that day featuring speakers including yourself

and Newt Gingrich, as well as the executive directors of the House and Senate

conservative caucuses. Do you recall that?}:

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

The discussion during that call apparently focused on State legislatures

25 sending alternative slates of electors as the only remaining path forward

...ali alex rambo quote willing to give life for fight, are you?

was willing to give his life for this fight?

A I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Q And what did you or the Arizona Republican Party intend to convey by

4 retweeting this and saying, "He is. Are you?"

I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Q I will next direct your attention to another tweet. This is exhibit 28, please.

Dr. Ward, do you recognize this?

A I rely on my Fifth Amendment privilege.

Q This is a tweet that you posted, KelliWardAZ, on December 19, 2020, at

10 8:53 p.m.

:{In this tweet, you were tweeting support for President Trump and stated that you

were, quote, "working every avenue to stop this coup." You ended the post with

"#CrossTheRubicon" and tagged General Flynn, "@GenFlynn...

apple maps not give route to DC?]}:

...Based on the objections that we've heard today, including your various assertions

23 of attorney-client privilege, which we plan to discuss with your attorneys after this

24 deposition, at this time this deposition will be in recess, subject to the call of the chair.

And we can go off the record.

Mr.[laurin?] Mills. Before you go off the record, we object to that:{. We believe we've

fully complied with the subpoena at this point.}:

3 - Mr. Mills, your objection is stated on the record, but this deposition

at this time will be recessed, subject to the call of the chair.

5 Mr. Mills. You have my objection.

6 - Okay. Thank you.

7 We can go off the record now.

8 [Whereupon, at 5:03 p.m., the deposition was recessed, subject to the call of the chair

===

an 2 23 salon

Arizona's Republican-controlled state legislature advanced bills last month that they claim will improve election transparency — but voting rights advocates worry will actually have the opposite effect.

The state House elections committee last week voted to pass House Bill 2308 – a bill that would bar any future secretary of state from overseeing and confirming the results of an election if they are a candidate. The bill comes after then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs won the gubernatorial election in November.

"There's a lack of confidence from some of my constituents in the election itself," Republican state Rep. Rachel Jones of Tucson, who presented the bill, said during the committee meeting. "I think the optics of that – of a secretary of state running their own election for governor and then certifying that election was a major concern."

State Rep. Melody Hernandez, a Tempe Democrat, questioned why the bill was being presented now but wasn't a concern when GOP Secretaries of State Ken Bennett and Michele Reagan were on the ballot in 2014 and 2018.

Jones countered that the environment changed after the 2020 election and claimed that "there's a lack of confidence in our election process" now, which brought the issue to the forefront.

When state Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, a Democrat from Laveen, asked her if she had "any concrete evidence that there were any misdeeds from the secretary of state in the 2022 election," Jones responded saying "It was more just the optics."

"It was instilling a lack of confidence in the results of the election," she added.

While there has been no evidence of corruption in the election process, Arizona Republicans have continued to sponsor bills they claim will instill faith in the election system for voters. Citing a survey from Rasmussen Reports, which has a history of Republican-leaning polling, Jones shared that 71% of U.S. voters stated they believed the midterms were "botched" during the committee meeting.

But voting rights organizations raised concerns that advancing such bills can create more uncertainty around the election system and even increase threats against election administrators.

"These are the same people who brought you the 'fraudit' following the 2020 election," a Democratic source who asked to remain anonymous told Salon. "So, it just continues to be more bad-faith conspiracy theories and, frankly, I think voters are tired of it. This has been going on now for two years. And because of it, we've seen so much of violent rhetoric, resulting in threats to the safety of secretaries of state and election administrators up and down the ballot."

The Maricopa County elections office recorded nearly 140 threatening and hostile communications against election workers between July and August of last year, according to Reuters.

Many of these threats stemmed from conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election that were promoted by former President Donald Trump and his allies.

The threats asserted false claims of fake ballots, fixed voting machines and corruption among election officials in the county during the 2020 election.

The same efforts that were used to sow doubt about the election system after the 2020 election are being repeated now, said Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting is Local and All Voting is Local Action.

"Despite the fact that our elections were overwhelmingly proven to be secure, reliable, trustworthy, there are still going to be efforts to drive mis- [and] disinformation from 2022, and use that as a pretextual basis for passing new laws, and that is exactly what we are seeing in Arizona," Fried added.

The Arizona legislature also passed three other bills, two of which the committee split along party lines.

House Bill 2319 would tell judges to "aggressively" favor an election-law interpretation that provides greater transparency and HB 2322 would put observers appointed by each party in charge of voter signature verification.

Observers would have the ability to challenge the decisions of election workers at polling places, voting centers and other counting facilities.

"Signature verification processes, often, the way they're carried out can be to the detriment of older voters," Fried said. "For example, people whose signatures have changed, you really want to be mindful of any kind of change because it can have a really direct impact on people's right to vote."

Beyond Arizona, other states are also enacting similar efforts to "chip away" at the opportunities that have helped more people access voting, she added.

If these efforts continue to advance in other states, it will allow legislators to strip power from people they didn't agree with, which defeats the purpose of having separate branches of government, a Democratic source told Salon.

"This is a hyper-partisan attack based on the fact that they don't like election results," said Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. "And I think that Arizona, frankly, has one of the strictest voter fraud guidelines already in the country."

Republicans have pushed out unproven claims of voter fraud when it comes to in-person early voting and voting by mail. Many candidates even made the centerpiece of their campaigns promising to ban some of these efforts.

Republican Arizona gubernatorial nomineeKari Lake said she would support slashing early and mail-in voting citing unsubstantiated or disproven claims of widespread voter fraud. When she lost to her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes in the midterm election, Lake refused to concede and instead filed a lawsuit against Hobbs and Maricopa County election officials claiming election fraud.

While her suit was dismissed in court last month, her efforts to sow doubt in the integrity of the election system have continued.

Lake came under fire recently for posting photos of voters' signatures on Twitter. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes asked Attorney General Kris Mayes to investigate her for potentially violating a state law that prohibits "records containing a voter's signature" from being used by another person who isn't the voter.

Even after election workers in Maricopa County were forced into hiding after receiving threats related to the 2022 midterms, Lake has continued to peddle conspiracy theories.

Now, the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature is passing bills fueled by such election conspiracy theories, which Fried pointed out has been a concerted effort to undermine election integrity for the last couple of years.

"There are points of connectivity between all of this," she added. "It's not happening by accident… people who are trying to break our systems are getting smarter about it, and the really kind of over-the-top stuff that we sometimes see getting replaced with things that look reasonable on the surface are not reasonable."

===

an 2 23 raw?

Republicans in Arizona suffered a string of brutal defeats this past fall after a string of hardline Trump-backed MAGA candidates flamed out against Democratic opponents.

However, Politico reports that the Arizona GOP isn't responding to this by trying to rehabilitate its image and is instead getting even angrier and doubling down on the election denialism that cost the party winnable races in 2022.

To illustrate this, the report notes that the party recently considered resolutions to censure Republicans who were involved in past elections on the grounds that those Republicans were part of a conspiracy to help Democrats win.

One particularly angry attendee stood up at the meeting and said traditional censures did not go far enough.

"We should duct tape people to a tree in a dog park, so the dogs can pee on them," the man declared. "And then, when they’re there for a few hours and they have to crap in their pants, they can wallow in their own sh*t.”

Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelly Ward, who herself has dabbled in conspiracy theories about chemtrails, similarly saw no need for reflection and insisted that "things are going great" with a party that lost a governorship, a Senate race, and a secretary of state race in the same election cycle despite having a favorable political environment.

Barrett Marson, an Arizona GOP strategist, told Politico that he wasn't sure how many more losses his party would have to take before they reckoned with the fact that running on election denialism is a loser strategy.

"The party may have to die to be reborn," he said.

===

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It took a few weeks, but One America News Network is finally settled into a predictable reaction to the 2022 midterms: claiming more Democratic fraud. In OAN’s view, no state had it worse than Arizona, a state the network relentlessly targeted with election misinformation, and where voters rejected numerous Republican nominees favored by OAN.

In the immediate wake of the election, OAN figures appeared to urge caution despite voters reporting numerous difficulties on election day; continuing to support GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake but stopping short of declaring fraud. But after the race was called, the floodgates opened for OAN to once again wail about “the biggest experiment in election fraud ever perpetrated on the American public.”

Unlike the 2020 election, some OAN figures are exploring novel solutions to losing elections this time around, like mail-in voting and ballot collecting (also known as “harvesting,”) two concepts that expand voting access, but which OAN alleges allow Democrats to steal elections. The inherent incongruity suggests that OAN is not serious about growing democracy, but only in sniveling resentfully, still captured by a lie partly of its own making.

At first, OAN exercised some caution in its coverage of Arizona’s gubernatorial race, possibly not wanting to sow too much doubt in case the results led to Lake’s projected victory. The day after the election, In Focus host Addison Smith acknowledged Arizona voters’ complaints of long lines and bureaucratic confusion, but said that he’s “not blaming losses from Republicans on a lack of election integrity this time around. You know, all things considered -- we’ll see what happens in Arizona -- but all things considered, I think the races the Democrats won were won pretty fair and square, according to the evidence in front of us.”[vid]

as results began to suggest that Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs might win, hints of fraud crept into OAN’s coverage. Within a week of Smith’s apparent expression of trust in elections, In Focus hosted right-wing YouTuber Drew Berquist, who complained that “whether it’s cameras going down, or a pipe leak, or a this, or the machines, whatever the case might be,” there is always a problem on election day that “gives them ample time to do stuff, and then voila -- the lights come on, the cameras come back on, and we’ve lost the race.”

On November 14, major news networks projected Hobbs’ victory, the dam broke, and OAN began declaring fraud. Real America host Dan Ball said that he’s not calling the race (OAN doesn’t have a decision desk) until “we can confirm every single vote was a legitimate vote and not harvested from, oh I don’t know, people that aren’t registered in Arizona? Dead people? You know, the stuff that always happens in every election, but shhh, we don't talk about it.”

Lake “has not conceded” to “supposed Governor-elect'' Hobbs, Ball later said, “and I don’t think she should,” citing voters’ election day complaints as well as the razor-thin margin. “But that doesn’t matter” to the media, Ball lamented while discussing another close race, “because they’ve got to call [the election for] the Democrat. That’s what they do. That’s just how it goes.”

On November 17, OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp made the calls explicit; in his style reminiscent of a man in a truck, Sharp unequivocally declared that “the Democrats once again stole another election,” and Democratic victors like Arizona Governor-elect Hobbs “just carried out the biggest experiment in voter fraud ever perpetrated on the American public.” Sharp’s segment included video of random Arizonans using ballot drop boxes as he warned of “clearly illegal voting fraud.” (:{2000 Mules:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: director Dinesh D’Souza is currently being sued for defamation over similar conduct.)

Echoing familiar themes to a far-right audience, Sharp pontificated that “the commiecrats used the pandemic as a backdoor to legalize all kinds of illegal voting practices, and now they can drag out an election for weeks, while they quietly fill in the votes wherever they need them.”[vid]

on November 19, soon after Sharp’s broadside, Attorney General Mark Brnovich -- a 2020 election denier and frequent OAN guest -- issued a letter demanding answers on reported voting issues from the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. According to The Washington Post, the letter contains “no findings that would call the outcome into question,” but it did further fuel OAN’s newly revived desire to cry fraud.

OAN reporter Daniel Baldwin aired a segment featuring interview footage with Christina Bobb, the Trumpworld attorney who previously led OAN’s “election integrity” coverage, while also helping the Trump campaign’s fake elector scheme. On OAN, Bobb played up Brnovich’s letter as proof that Brnovich saw a “potential crime there, whether it was intentional conduct or criminal negligence, whatever it is … it was enough to actually publish the letter.”

In a different Baldwin interview, Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers called for a “new election for 2022 for Maricopa County, there are no two ways about it.” Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward told Baldwin that “once again” Maricopa County “will be certifying an uncertifiable election. They did it in 2020, I think they plan to do it in 2022.” Ward also promised that “we are going through every single legal channel that is available and we are pushing forward to represent we, the people.”

Fittingly, Real America’s Ball injected a touch of inappropriate self-victimization to the frenzy. Ball compared election day issues in Arizona to anti-Black segregation using a clip from Free State of Jones, a 2016 movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a Confederate deserter who leads a rebellion against Confederate Mississippi -- in other words, fighting Democrats who would not allow Republicans to vote.

“Now this all happened hundreds of years ago, right?” Ball cheekily asked, “There’s no way that something like that could still happen today,” as though an unprecedented flood of election-day voting shares any similarities to Jim Crow.

[vid]

Interestingly, some OAN figures -- not all -- have mentioned a degree of openness to mail-in voting, thinking that Republicans could close future vote gaps. However, even this comes not from a place of humility or learning, but vengeance and paranoia. As Smith put it on November 30, either “we make ballot harvesting and mass mail-in voting illegal across-the-board … or we get so good at it ourselves that Democrats want to make it illegal.”

It was only a matter of time before OAN again reacted to a Republican defeat with allegations of election fraud: the network built its present identity out of such claims. OAN would have viewers believe that, in the same election where Democrats mastered the art of election theft, they also lost control of the House of Representatives, and therefore President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda. But perhaps allowing Republicans to block Democratic power for two years is also part of the Democrats’ plan to seize power.

11 22 an raw

On Tuesday's edition of MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," former Republican congressman and House January 6 Committee adviser Denver Riggleman weighed in on the efforts to gain communications by key allies of former President Donald Trump.

This comes after the Supreme Court shut down a request by Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward, who is suspected of working with Trump's allies to create a list of fraudulent presidential electors, to shut down a subpoena of her phone records — a subpoena which, according to Riggleman, could produce valuable information.

"Let me tell you, metadata and data is very powerful," said Riggleman. "When you talk about Kelli Ward, you're talking about someone who could be in the political side and the legal and the militant side. So when you have individuals fighting their phone records, you wonder why. And there could be one or two calls that go to people that are rally or right extremist groups and there are White House numbers and who was she talking to in the White House around January 6."

"As far as the Secret Service texts, I would like to see what is policing," said Riggleman. "But the before and after could be very powerful. On the Secret Service texts, if they could put that thread together it is very interesting to see who thought Trump was doing the right thing and who was supporting him and things of that nature. As far as Kelli Ward, I think you have a factor for people whose data out there, whether they realize, that the technical teams have a millions of lines of data and there is a link system to see the connections very quickly. And it is very, very robust. So I think you see that is why people are fighting."

Furthermore, continued Riggleman, when it comes toClarence Thomas — whose wife was heavily involved in pressuring Arizona lawmakers to throw out the 2020 election results, and who was one of only two justices to vote in favor of Ward's request, it is "not a surprise that he voted against this."

"I have a special place in my heart with the Thomases, and it is to a point that if there is not more investigation into Ginni Thomas, I don't know what to say," said Riggleman. "I think she's key. I was one of the first to see the text messages, I think we need to do a much deeper drive into Ginni Thomas and some of the people around her."

Watch below or at this link.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/clarence-thomas/

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A long-standing call for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to face impeachment proceedings was renewed Monday after the right-wing judge indicated in an unsigned dissent that he would have blocked enforcement of the House January 6 panel's subpoena for the communications records of Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward.

The House committee investigating the deadly January 6 insurrection "is seeking Ward's records related to her role in former President Donald Trump's effort to steal the 2020 election as a fake elector casting ballots in the Electoral College for Trump," HuffPost reported.

In a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for the panel to obtain Ward's phone records, rejecting the Arizona GOP chair's appeal. Right-wing Justice Samuel Alito joined Thomas in dissenting.

This marked the second time Thomas has tried to hinder the committee's probe of the Trump-led effort to remain in office despite his 2020 election loss—a plot in which Thomas' wife, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, played a major role.

Thomas in January was the only justice to vote against the release of White House records to the panel.Two months later, text messages between former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas showed that she had been in communication with Trump's team about efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's electoral victory.

Weeks later, it was revealed that Ginni Thomas had lobbied Republican lawmakers in Arizona and other states to reject Biden's electors and appoint fake ones who would support Trump. Since late March, congressional Democrats have called on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself, resign, or be impeached for apparently trying to shield his wife's anti-democratic political activities from scrutiny.

"His wife, Ginni Thomas, pressured Arizona officials to illegally overturn Trump's loss," Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a D.C.-based watchdog, noted Monday. "It's absurd that Thomas did not recuse."

"Justice Thomas must face an impeachment inquiry," the pro-democracy advocacy group Free Speech for People tweeted.

A petition calling for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas has garnered more than 1.2 million signatures since details about Ginni Thomas' direct participation in Trump's failed coup were first made publi

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The phone records of Kelli Ward, who has unsuccessfully filed multiple lawsuits seeking to throw out the 2020 presidential election results and hand the state's electoral votes to Donald Trump, will now go to the committee after a split 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to dismiss her motion to keep them hidden.

According to the report from Politico's Josh Gerstein, "Ward argued that the subpoena violates her First Amendment rights by intruding on her activities as chairperson of the Arizona Republican Party, but the order issued Saturday by the appeals court panel’s majority said those concerns weren’t serious enough to keep the House from accessing details about her calls."

In their ruling, Judges Barry Silverman andDonald Trump-appointed Eric Millerwrote, "The investigation, after all, is not about Ward’s politics; it is about her involvement in the events leading up to the January 6 attack, and it seeks to uncover those with whom she communicated in connection with those events. That some of the people with whom Ward communicated may be members of a political party does not establish that the subpoena is likely to reveal ‘sensitive information about [the party’s] members and supporters.’”

Ward was previously deposed by the committee and repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions from the Jan. 6 committee.

You can read more here.

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The Arizona Republican Party chair pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions from the Jan. 6 committee.

Kelli Ward, the top-ranking GOP official in the key swing state, invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination during an interview with the House select committee, which she is trying to block from obtaining her phone records from the period between the 2020 election and Joe Biden's inauguration, reported Politico.

“Dr. Ward was deposed by the select committee, and she declined to answer on every substantive question and asserted her rights under the Fifth Amendment,” said Eric Columbus, an attorney for the select committee.

It's not clear when she sat for her deposition, but Columbus revealed her assertions in a hearing before Arizona-based U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa related to her lawsuit seeking to block T-Mobile from turning over her phone records.

IN OTHER NEWS: Ketanji Brown Jackson levels long-standing conservative claims against voting laws

Humetewa recently rejected Ward's effort, but she has asked the judge for a delay while she seeks a review of her case by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ward has complained that, as a medical doctor, her phone records could identify patients she's treating and possibly harm Republican activists she had been contacting, but Columbus argued that the select committee was only interested in the logs of incoming and outgoing calls to determine when relevant contacts took place.

“There is nothing unique about Dr. Ward here,” Columbus said, but noting that it was an "investigation of a very political event, an attempt to overthrow and subvert an election.”

Ward was among 10 pro-Trump electors from Arizona and also joined a December 2020 lawsuit pressuring vice president Mike Pence to seat them instead of Biden electors.

politico

arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering questions from the Jan. 6 select committee, a lawyer for the panel revealed in federal court Tuesday.

“Dr. Ward was deposed by the select committee, and she declined to answer on every substantive question and asserted her rights under the Fifth Amendment,” select committee attorney Eric Columbus said during a court hearing before Arizona-based U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa. Columbus did not say when Ward’s deposition took place, though the select panel’s subpoena instructed her to appear on March 8, 2022.

columbus revealed Ward’s posture during a hearing on the committee’s attempt to obtain her phone records from cell phone carrier T-Mobile. Ward sued the panel to block T-Mobile from cooperating, but Humetewa recently rejected her effort. Tuesday’s hearing came amid Ward’s effort to ask Humetewa to delay the impact of her ruling while she seeks a review from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

An attorney for Ward declined to comment.

Ward is seeking to block the select committee from obtaining records of her calls between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021 — the frenetic final weeks of former President Donald Trump’s term in office as he sought to cling to power. Columbus noted that the panel had received similar records from “hundreds” of other witnesses without incident.

But Ward, a medical doctor, has claimed that the select committee could use the records to identify patients she’s treating for sensitive conditions and also seek to chill Republican activists who had been in touch with her during that tumultuous time.

Ward attorney Laurin Mills told Humetewa that the select committee’s probe could wind up being “worse than the capitol riot” if its work led to the “criminalization of politics.” Humetewa quickly admonished Mills, noting that the select committee has no criminal authority but is pursuing legislative goals. Mills responded by noting the Justice Department’s “parallel investigation” into efforts by allies of Trump to subvert the 2020 election. It’s not entirely surprising some witnesses would choose to avoid testifying to the select panel given the DOJ’s investigation, which the department revealed in January 2022.

columbus noted that the select committee had no intention to obtain the substance of any texts or calls Ward made during that period — only logs of incoming and outgoing calls and phone numbers, which the panel could then use to determine when key contacts related to the 2020 election occurred.

"There is nothing unique about Dr. Ward here,” Columbus said, adding that it’s unsurprising the panel’s probe touched on political players because it’s an “investigation of a very political event, an attempt to overthrow and subvert an election.”

Humetewa pressed Columbus about why the committee is only now pressing for Ward’s records, after deferring for months. Columbus said the panel had opted to prioritize its resources and timing on other areas of the investigation first.

The select committee subpoenaed Ward in February, seeking her testimony and records about her involvement in Trump’s effort to remain in power. Ward helped assemble a slate of GOP activists to falsely claim to be the state’s certified presidential electors, even though Joe Biden prevailed narrowly in the November 2020 election there. Prosecutors are investigating the effort to send false elector slates to Washington, which was a key element of Trump’s effort to stoke a conflict on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to count electoral votes and certify Biden’s victory.

The select committee has subpoenaed dozens of Republicans who acted as Trump’s electors in states where Biden was the certified winner. It’s unclear how many have cooperated with the panel’s inquiry.

Several dozen other witnesses have asserted their Fifth Amendment rights rather than testifying to the select committee. They include former national security adviser Mike Flynn, Trump confidant Roger Stone, attorney John Eastman and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark.

In addition to her work on the pro-Trump Arizona elector slate — in which she was one of 10 members — Ward joined a December 2020 lawsuit aimed at forcing then-Vice President Mike Pence’s hand ahead of the Jan. 6 session of Congress, when Pence was set to preside over the electoral vote count.

Ward and her fellow false electors have been subpoenaed in the ongoing Justice Department investigation. But Wardindicated in a court filing last week that all 10 of Arizona’s electors challenged the subpoenas and have not heard back from the Justice Department about their objections. DOJ has taken no steps to enforce the subpoenas as well, she noted.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/16/jan-6-gohmert-lawsuit-pence-524839

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INSURRECTION FALLOUT

The Jan. 6 puzzle piece that's going largely ignored

Rep. Louie Gohmert sued then-Vice President Mike Pence on Dec. 27. Donald Trump’s involvement in the case remains unclear.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), who is now running for Texas attorney general, has said little about his lawsuit.

By KYLE CHENEY

12/16/2021

As Donald Trump and his allies squeezed then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Joe Biden’s presidency in the weeks ahead of Jan. 6, they used one particular tool that’s been largely ignored ever since.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) sued Pence on Dec. 27, just as Trump was ratcheting up his pressure campaign against his vice president. Backed by a squad of lawyers associated with Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, Gohmert argued Pence should assert unilateral control over certification, governed only by the vague wording of the Twelfth Amendment.

Gohmert’s move forced Pence to publicly resist Trump’s subversion of the election, only a week before the fateful Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. When the Justice Department stepped in to defend Pence from the lawsuit on Dec. 29, it marked the first time Pence signaled he wouldn’t fold to Trump’s demands.

Pence allies have long believed that Trump played a role in Gohmert’s legal strategy, and they’ve indicated that Trump was frustrated that the Justice Department intervened to defend his vice president against Gohmert’s suit. But what remains unknown is just how involved Trump was in Gohmert’s legal strategy. A spokesperson for the former president did not respond to a request for comment.

And while it’s unclear whether the Jan. 6 select panel is probing the genesis of Gohmert’s suit — which was quickly rejected by federal district and appellate courts in Texas — one committee member described it as an important episode in the runup to the violence at the Capitol.

“It’s a significant detail in that it was part of a plan to isolate and coerce Pence,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

A litany of new details about Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence have emerged in recent weeks. Those include memos from Trump attorneys John Eastman and Jenna Ellis that lay out fringe legal rationales for halting certification, as well as proof of further public and private force exerted by Trump himself. Gohmert’s suit is rarely mentioned in the publicly available pre-Jan. 6 timetable.

Gohmert’s goal, outlined in the suit, was to force Pence to ignore the 130-year-old law that governs the final certification of presidential elections and instead wield total authority over the proceedings. Pence ultimately decided that he lacked this power and his role was almost entirely ceremonial. He revealed his final decision on Jan. 6, shortly before a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol amid chants that he was a “traitor” and should be hanged.

As for why Gohmert led the suit, Powell has publicly indicated that one reason was because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has jurisdiction over his home state of Texas. Alito, Powell argued, might have bought more time for pro-Trump forces to reverse the results by blocking Pence from certifying Biden’s victory. (There’s no evidence Alito was considering this).

Wilenchik said 'fake'? He meant to say ...

Kind of damning, don’t you think?

Perhaps that is why the report noted that Wilenchik sent a follow-up email saying, “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” followed by a smiley face emoji.

wilenchik also pointed out Ward’s part in the scheme, saying she wanted to keep the fake electors plot “under wraps until Congress counts the vote Jan. 6th (so we can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it) – I tend to agree with her.”

We already know from previous reporting that Ward and her husband, Michael, received grand jury subpoenas from the Department of Justice regarding their involvement in the fake electors operation.

Fake electors should pay a price for this

And we’ve known about the coup attempt almost from the beginning.

All of which might cause some to wonder why these latest revelations even need to be reported?

December 17, 2020

Ron Watkins, former administrator for the extremist bulletin board 8chan, urges Trump to “cross the Rubicon.” The phrase refers to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River with an army to install himself as sovereign, which precipitated starting a bloody Roman civil war. The phrase is echoed by Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward days later.

(Source: Twitter)

The Women for America First bus tour, meanwhile, pays a visit to a firearms academy near Nashville, Tennessee, and tour participant Jennifer Lynn Lawrence posts a video of herself, Kylie Jane Kremer, Dustin Stockton and Amy Kremer posing with rifles.The website for Tactical Response, the location where the video was reportedly filmed, features a tagline on its website: “We teach good people to kill bad people.”

(Source: Facebook)

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona alleges on Twitter that 700,000 votes were compromised and that Trump won Arizona despite the stated election results. Gosar includes the hashtag #StopTheSteal and tags Ali Alexander in his post.

(Source: Twitter)

December 19, 2020

Trump tweets out a call for his supporters to protest in D.C. on the day when Electoral College votes are set to be certified by Congress. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” Trump says, adding, “Big protest in DC on January 6th.Be there, will be wild!”

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2022/06/30/karen-fann-kelly-townsend-subpoenaed-fbi-arizona-lawmakers/7785249001/

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fBI subpoenas records of Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, state Sen. Kelly Townsend

Ray Stern

Mary Jo Pitzl

Arizona Republic

Arizona state Sen. Kelly Townsend (top) and Arizona Senate President Karen Fann.

The FBI has issued subpoenas to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and state Sen. Kelly Townsend, compelling them to release records believed related to former President Donald Trump's effort to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

Fann, the longtime Republican lawmaker from Prescott who ordered the partisan review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, told The Arizona Republic the FBI issued a Freedom of Information Act request "in the form of a subpoena for my emails and communications. I'm instructed not to discuss."

She wouldn't confirm another report stating that the probe sought records about contacts from Trump and his team following the November 2020 election. But she added, "pretty sure everything they've asked for has already been foiaed numerous times over the past 18 months," using an acronym for the information act.

Democracy in doubt:The origins of the Arizona election review

The Yellow Sheet, a political newsletter, first reported the subpoenas.

In mid-November 2020, Fann told House Speaker Rusty Bowers that Trump's advocates had called her repeatedly, encouraging her to help him find a way to get ahead of Joe Biden in Arizona, where Trump lost by about 10,500 votes.

Public records also show that on Dec. 28, Fann told a constituent she was in “numerous conversations with Rudy Giuliani over the past weeks trying to get this done. I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud."

Townsend, who lives in Apache Junction and has served in the Legislature since 2013, told The Republic that she had received a subpoena but did not comment further. She told 12 News that the FBI sought communications records with Trump's lawyers and that she and her staff were complying.

Last week, Kelli Ward, chairwoman of the state Republican Party and her husband Michael, were subpoenaed by the Department of Justice regarding their roles in creating and attempting to submit a slate of fake electors for the November 2020 election.

The Washington Post last week reported that two of the other 11 fake electors — Loraine Pellegrino and Nancy Cottle — also received subpoenas from a federal grand jury. The two women were subpoenaed earlier this year by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The congressional panel also subpoenaed the Wards for their phone records, which the couple is fighting in federal court. The case is pendi}:ng.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/magazine/arizona-republicans-democracy.html

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The Arizona Republican Party’s Anti-Democracy Experiment

First, it turned against the establishment. Now it has set its sights on democracy — the principles, the process and even the word itself.

A primary eve rally in Phoenix featuring onstage, from left, the former Trump official Richard Grenell, the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times]

By Robert Draper

Aug. 15, 2022

Rose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., answered immediately when I asked her to name the first Republican leader she admired. “I grew up during the time thatJoe McCarthywas doing his talking,” Sperry, an energetic 81-year-old, said of the Wisconsin senator who in the 1950s infamously claimed Communists had infiltrated the federal government. “I was young, but I was listening. If he were here today, I would say, ‘Get him in there as president!’”

Sperry is part of a grass-roots movement that has pushed her state’s party far to the right in less than a decade. She had driven 37 miles the morning of July 16, from her home in the Northern Arizona town Cottonwood to the outskirts of Prescott, to attend the monthly meeting of a local conservative group called the Lions of Liberty, who, according to the group’s website, “are determined to correct the course of our country, which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats and fake news.” That dismal view of America today was echoed by nearly every other conservative voter and group I encountered across the state over the past year.

Arizona has become a bellwether for the rest of the nation, and not just because of its new status as a swing state and the first of these to be called for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It was and has continued to be the nexus of efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the 2020 election results. At the same time, party figures from Trump down to Rose Sperry have sought to blacklist every Arizona G.O.P. official who maintained that the election was fairly won — from Gov. Doug Ducey to Rusty Bowers, speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Such leaders have been condemned as RINOs, or Republicans in name only, today’s equivalent of the McCarthy era’s “fellow travelers.”

The aggressive takeover of the Arizona G.O.P. by its far-right wing was made manifest on primary night earlier this month, when a slate of Trump-endorsed candidates — the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem — all prevailed. As a group, they maintain that the 2020 election was stolen, have promoted conspiracy theories about Covid and have vowed to protect Arizona’s schools from gender ideology, critical race theory and what McCarthyites denounced 70 years ago as “godless communism.”

They have cast the 2022 election as not just history-defining but potentially civilization-ending. As Lake told a large crowd in downtown Phoenix the night before the primary: “It is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats. This is a battle between freedom and tyranny, between authoritarianism and liberty and between good and evil.” A week later, in response to the F.B.I.’s executing a search warrant at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Lake posted a statement on Twitter: “These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America.” She added, “America — dark days lie ahead for us.” Far from offering an outlier’s view, Lake was articulating the dire stance shared by numerous other Republicans on the primary ballot and by the reactionary grass-roots activists who have swept them into power.

Whether that viewpoint is politically viable in a swing state is another question. Arizona’s two U.S. senators, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, are both Democrats. The tissue-thin Republican majorities in Arizona’s State Legislature — 31 to 29 in the House, 16 to 14 in the Senate — are the most precarious the G.O.P. has experienced in over a quarter-century as the ruling party. And, of course, Trump lost Arizona in 2020, in large part by alienating the college-educated suburbanites who have relocated to the Phoenix metropolitan area of Maricopa County in increasing numbers.

Arizona has thus become what the state’s well-regarded pollster Mike Noble characterizes as “magenta, the lightest state of red.” In the face of this shift, the state’s G.O.P. has aggressively declined to moderate itself. Instead, it has endeavored to cast out some of its best-known political figures. Last year, it censured its sitting governor, Doug Ducey; its former U.S. senator Jeff Flake; and Cindy McCain, the widow of the U.S. senator and 2008 G.O.P. presidential nominee John McCain, arguably the state party’s second-most-famous elected official, after Barry Goldwater.

In the weeks leading up to its Aug. 2 primary, and now as it turns toward the general election in November, Arizona has presented an American case study in how backlash to demographic and social change can cause a political party to turn on itself,even at its own electoral peril. “The fact that so much energy is being spent RINO-slaying and not beating Democrats is not a healthy place for our party to be in the long run,” one political consultant who works in multiple Western states including Arizona (and who requested anonymity to not alienate current and potential clients) observed fretfully.

When I recently spoke by phone with the stateG.O.P.’s chairwoman, Kelli Ward, and shared this consultant’s concern, she offered a defiant laugh. “That’s the same argument that they’ve been making again and again and again, decade after decade,” Ward told me. “And they deliver us these spineless weaklings who cave in like rusty lawn chairs at the snap of a Democrat’s finger. I’m sick of it, and the people are sick of it.” A day after we spoke, Ward announced on Twitter that party officials had voted to censure yet another of their own: Bowers, the sitting House speaker, one of the few state Republican leaders who had remained steadfast in publicly saying that Trump lost Arizona fair and square, and had recently testified to the Jan. 6 House committee that vengeful opponents had driven a van through his neighborhood with a video screen calling him a pedophile. Bowers, Ward proclaimed in her tweet, “is no longer a Republican in good standing & we call on Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary.” (Bowers was defeated.)

But there is more at stake than the health of the Republican Party when its core activists, as well as a growing number of officials and those campaigning for governmental positions, openly espouse hostility not just to democratic principles but, increasingly, to the word “democracy” itself. It has long been a talking point on the right — from a chant at the 1964 Republican convention where Goldwater became the G.O.P. nominee to a set of tweets in 2020 by Senator Mike Lee of Utah — that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. The idea, embodied by the Electoral College’s primacy over the popular vote in presidential elections, is that the founders specifically rejected direct popular sovereignty in favor of a representative system in which the governing authorities are states and districts, not individual voters. But until very recently, democracy has been championed on the right: President George W. Bush, a subject of two books I’ve written, famously promoted democracy worldwide (albeit through military aggression that arguably undermined his cause). For that matter, in Trump’s speech at the rally on Jan. 6, he invoked the word “democracy” no fewer than four times, framing the attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a last-ditch effort to “save our democracy.”

What is different now is the use of “democracy” as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-“democracy” sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.

It’s the failure to reinstall a legitimately defeated president, under the misguided belief that victory was stolen from him, that seems to have ushered in the view among Arizona Republicans — and many more across the nation — that democracy itself was at fault and had been weaponized by the political left, or the “enemies from within,” as McCarthy once put it. As it happened, Rose Sperry wasn’t the first person to invoke the Wisconsin senator at the Lions of Liberty event. “I had a weird dream last night about Joseph McCarthy,” said one of the morning’s featured speakers, Jim Arroyo, the head of Arizona’s biggest chapter of the Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group made up largely of current and former members of the armed forces and law enforcement. McCarthy, he said, “was not only right — he understated the seriousness of it.”

Arroyo’s eschatological rhetoric was echoed by the down-ballot Republican candidates who spoke to the group. One of them was Selina Bliss, a precinct committeewoman and nursing teacher at Yavapai College who was running for a State House seat. (On Aug. 2, she was defeated by the G.O.P. incumbent, Quang Nguyen, who earlier this year authored legislation, later signed into law, requiring that Arizona high school students receive anti-Communist civics instruction.) Bliss reminded her friends and neighbors that they belonged to a thriving activist movement: “We Republicans, we conservatives, we’re the grass roots, we come from the bottom up.”

Image Blake Masters, in white shirt, outside a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., in July.]

But after the seeming paean to political participation, she took a turn. “I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time,” Bliss said. “And that’s the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant.” She then said: “We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s not us.”

It once would have been jarring to hear a candidate for state legislative office ignore the usual parochial issues — property taxes, water access, state funding for universities — and instead repudiate the very idea of democracy in America. But Bliss’s view was hardly out of place here. Sperry, the activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: “Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!”

The Republican activities across Arizona before its primary could have been mistaken, at first glance, for a collective celebration of democracy rather than a threat to it. Rows of yard signs, nearly all of them for G.O.P. candidates, stretched along highways from Maricopa County to the northern conservative strongholds of Mohave and Yavapai Counties. Candidate meet-and-greets, held in coffee shops and strip malls and V.F.W. halls, were hosted by activist groups like the Granite Mountain Republican Women and United Patriots AZ. Among the candidates, the closest thing to an entrenched party war horse was two six-term congressmen from the 2010 Tea Party class, Paul Gosar and David Schweikert, each of whom were now, because of redistricting, having to sell themselves to voters in newly drawn but still red districts. (Both incumbents won.) Otherwise, the field was replete with political novices, suggestive of what Selina Bliss, at the Lions of Liberty meeting, referred to as a seeming “bottom up” democratization of the Republican Party.

But most of the G.O.P. candidates seemed to share Bliss’s fears of majority rule as well as a desire to inflict harsh punishment on those they perceive as threats, deviants and un-American. Possibly the most notorious Arizona Republican to appear on the primary ballot wasState Senator Wendy Rogers. She was censured in March by her fellow state senators for telling a white-nationalist group, referring to state and federal officials who had enacted Covid vaccine mandates, “If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who betrayed our country.”

Yet Rogers would go on to win her primary, easily defeating a fellow G.O.P. state senator, Kelly Townsend, whose communications with Trump lawyers have been subpoenaed by the F.B.I., presumably for information she might have about the plot by Trump allies to replace Arizona’s legitimate electors with fake ones. No moderate herself, Townsend recently vowed that vigilantes at primary polling stations would monitor voters they deemed suspicious: “We’re going to have people parked out there watching you, and they’re going to follow you to your car and get your license plate.”

The leading name in this new Republican wave is that of Lake, the gubernatorial candidate, who was a well-known personality on Phoenix’s Fox affiliate for over two decades. At a Trump rally in Arizona I attended in January, she called for the arrest of illegal border-crossers and also of Dr. Anthony Fauci for unspecified Covid-related offenses, as well as unspecified conspirators “in that corrupt, shady, shoddy election of 2020.” To this litany of suspected criminals, Lake has also added teachers. “Put cameras in the classroom,” she told the Arizona conservative talk-radio host Garret Lewis last November, arguing that parents should have access to video evidence of “something being taught in the classroom” that they might deem objectionable.

Lake neatly if hyperbolically described the Arizona G.O.P.’s us-versus-them outlook on Twitter in June: “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens. They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let’s bring back the basics: God, Guns & Glory.” On her campaign website, Lake describes the media — her former profession — as “corrupt” and “the enemy of the people.” A campaign video displays her bashing televisions to bits with a sledgehammer and a baseball bat. At a rally the night before the primary, she directed her audience to turn around and “show these bastards” — referring to the camera crews positioned on a riser — their disapproval, which they proceeded to do with loud jeers.

Lake has said she decided to leave journalism in 2021 because of disenchantment with the news media’s liberal bias. In fact, Lake herself donated to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. A decade later, Lake’s preference had changed. She visited the White House in June 2019 to do a story for the local Fox affiliate on Stephanie Grisham, who years before served as the press secretary for the Arizona House Majority Caucusand who had just been named communications director for the first lady, Melania Trump. “What got me was how much of a fangirl for Donald Trump she was,” Grisham told me. “When she got there, she was absolutely gushing about him. I remember thinking, Even for Fox, this is a bit much.”

Trump endorsed Lake last September, a few hours after she wrote on Twitter that the likeness of the former president should be chiseled into Mount Rushmore. Trump also endorsed Blake Masters, now the Arizona Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly. Masters, the 36-year-old former C.O.O. of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, embraces the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “If you say as a candidate, ‘Obviously, the Democrats, they hope to just change the demographics of our country, they hope to import an entirely new electorate,’ they call you a bigot,” he told Rob Hephner, who goes by Birdman, on the “Patriot Edition” podcast in April. Such views are in alignment with those of Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, who gave Masters his “forceful endorsement.” (Masters rejected the endorsement.) The campaign yard signs for Masters that I saw festooning Arizona’s highways bore pledges like “Blake Masters Will Prosecute Fauci” and “Blake Masters Won’t Ask Your Pronouns.”

Trump’s interest in Arizona officeseekers like Masters and Lake is anything but casual. For nearly two years running, he has repeatedly cited both his continuing desire to overturn the 2020 presidential election and Arizona’s centrality to that effort. At a rally in Prescott Valley on July 22,Trump spoke glowingly of the G.O.P. state chairwoman, Kelli Ward — “she’s winning so much.” Ward has championed the State Senate’s election audit of Maricopa County, calling it “America’s Audit.” (Arizona election officials had already conducted a succession of recounts and audits before this one by an outfit called Cyber Ninjas, headed by a conservative election denier named Doug Logan, which found in the end that Biden had won 99 more votes and Trump 261 fewer than originally recorded.)

A primary eve rally in Phoenix, in August.

The most telling among Trump’s Arizona endorsements is that of the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, whom Trump has described in an official statement as “a true warrior” who took an “incredibly powerful stance on the Massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.” Indeed, Finchem, as a state representative, was one of Arizona’s first public officials to baselessly claim that the state’s voting machines had been corrupted in Biden’s favor. At a candidate forum I attended in mid-July, Finchem disclosed to the audience that he had charged $5,000 to his personalAmerican Express card to rent out a Phoenix hotel conference room where, on Nov. 30, 2020,he and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani staged a multihour presentation to Finchem’s fellow state legislators of supposed fraud in Arizona, even as state officials were certifying the election for Biden a few miles away. As secretary of state, Finchem would be Arizona’s top election official during a potential rematch of Trump and Biden in 2024 and could work to invalidate the results, which the current secretary of state, the Democrat Katie Hobbs, now running for governor, refused to do in 2020.

The enmeshment of Finchem and other Arizona Republicans in the tumultuous final weeks of Trump’s presidency is remarkable in its depth and complexity. On Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, Representative Paul Gosar conceived the first protest of the results anywhere in the United States, marching to the Maricopa County recorder’s office in Phoenix, where the ballots were still being tallied. Joining Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell in a postelection lawsuit seeking to invalidate Arizona’s results, on the factually unsupported grounds that “old-fashioned 19th-century ballot stuffing” had occurred there, was the Phoenix lawyer Alexander Kolodin, who on primary night won a seat in the State Legislature (no Democrat will oppose him in the general election). As the flurry of Arizona lawsuits failed one by one, the state’s G.O.P. chairwoman, Ward — who had also filed an unsuccessful election lawsuit — maintained a weekslong pressure campaign against the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to throw out the results, saying in one ominous text message (among many that were obtained by The Arizona Republic), “I know you don’t want to be remembered as the guy who led the charge to certify a fraudulent election.”

Two weeks after the Nov. 30 election-fraud hearing convened by Finchem and Giuliani, while state officials were certifying the Arizona results, the official state G.O.P. Twitter account posted a video of Ward and 10 other Republicans signing documents falsely proclaiming themselves to be the state’s electors and declaring the election results illegitimate. Among the phony electors were three Republicans who would later appear on the 2022 primary ballot: the U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon and the State Senate candidates Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman. (Lamon was defeated by Masters; Kern and Hoffman won.) This fake-elector scheme had been in the works for over a month and involved Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in emails obtained by The Washington Post urged two Arizona lawmakers, Speaker Rusty Bowers and State Representative Shawnna Bolick, to “take action to ensure that a clean slate of electors is chosen.”

When that maneuver also failed to bear fruit, several Arizona Republicans joined with Trump in attempting a final desperate postelection measure. On Dec. 21, 2020, Gosar and his fellow Arizona congressman Andy Biggs, then the head of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, were among a group of G.O.P. House members who met with Trump in the White House to discuss actions including calling on Vice President Mike Pence to decertify the election results unilaterally.Two weeks later, on Jan. 5, 2021, 16 Arizona legislators — Bolick, Kern and Finchem among them — signed a letter to Pence that was also signed by Republican legislators in four other contested states, urging him to delay certifying the election results for 10 days. Pence refused to do so, and on Jan. 6, Kern and Finchem were among the Arizonans who descended on the Capitol. Finchem photographed the riotous mob and posted it on Twitter with the caption, “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”

As a result of their involvement in Trump’s efforts to steal back the presidency, Finchem, Ward, Biggs and other Arizona Republicans have been issued subpoenas by the Jan. 6 committee. (Though Ward taunted Democrats last year for their resistance to the State Senate audit in Arizona — “What are they hiding?” she demanded at the time — she has since sued to block the committee from obtaining her cellphone records.) Back home in Arizona, however, they have faced no reprisals within their party. Far from it: Their willingness to assist Trump in overturning the 2020 election was rewarded across the boards on primary night.

There was no mystery as to why. According to a state survey of Arizona voters last year, 61 percent of Republicans believed the 2020 election “was stolen from President Trump.” Perhaps not by coincidence, the G.O.P. primary candidates who spoke the most vociferously about fraud in the 2020 elections were those like Kari Lake and Blake Masters, who were not in Trump’s trenches back then and now had to work overtime to prove themselves fit for combat against the enemy.

“We are a Wild West state,” Lake proudly declared to a cheering audience at the Trump rally I attended in January. She was saluting her state’s undomesticated spirit and distinguishing it from what she termed the “socialist garbage” prevalent in California. Much like Texans, residents of the last contiguous state to enter the Union have long evinced a certain pride in their nearly uninhabitable territory, insofar as doing so confers a toughness that their effete neighbors to the west may lack. Lake was no doubt also nodding to the worrisome demographic reality that some 60,000 Californians relocated to Arizona in 2020. What some activists on the right derisively refer to as the looming “Californication” of Arizona — high taxes, increased gun restrictions and liberalization of social values — ranks high on the list of existential anxieties among the state’s conservatives. “They don’t win with their ideas,” Lake said of progressives to her supporters the night before the primary, “because their ideas are what sunk California.”

Roughly 39 percent of Arizona’s land is federally owned. The local hostility to government control, combined with the sense of rough-hewn independence fostered by its desert climate, has meant that conservatism in Arizona has long possessed an extremist underbelly. One former longtime state G.O.P. operative brought up the congressional district long represented by Gosar, which includes most of Mohave and Yavapai Counties, two of the two most conservative in Arizona. (The home page for the Mohave County G.O.P. contains the banner headline, “Protecting Our Republic ... One Voter at a Time.” The Yavapai County G.O.P.’s website includes links to the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast as well as to the Gateway Pundit website, which has been banned on Twitter and demonetized by Google for promoting ludicrous conspiracy theories.) “These are the ranchers of the West,” the former operative told me. “They literally will meet you with a gun at their door if you try to say hello. It makes canvassing very difficult.” This person noted that Kingman, a town in Mohave County, was where Timothy McVeigh spent several months discussing with fellow extremists his plans to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As the former operative told me, “This is the part of the country where they believe Timothy McVeigh was right.”

Other political observers in Arizona point to Gov. Evan Mecham, elected in 1986 and impeached and removed from office only 15 months into his term (for obstruction of justice and misusing public funds to prop up his ailing auto dealership), as an early sign of a far-right base that Trump would later exploit. Mecham, who rescinded the state holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while blaming America’s high divorce rate on women’s entering the labor force, vowed to his death that his political career had been undone by a vast conspiracy.

The bridge between Mecham and Trump would prove to be Joe Arpaio, who took office as Maricopa County sheriff in 1993, five years after Mecham’s removal, and stepped down in 2017 after losing his latest re-election bid. Styling himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” Arpaio achieved notoriety for his barbaric attitude toward county inmates before later refashioning himself as Arizona’s foremost proponent of strict border-enforcement measures and, later still, as a pioneer of the “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. Arpaio became an early spokesman for candidateTrump, who as president would pardon Arpaio after he was found guilty of contempt of court. Arpaio, now 90, was also on the ballot for the Aug. 2 primary, barely losing a campaign to be mayor of Fountain Hills, an affluent town in Maricopa County with a population of some 24,000.

Of course, Arizona’s dominant modern-day political figures — the Democrats Carl Hayden and Morris Udall, the Republicans Goldwater and McCain — have shaped the state and its national standing in ways that Arpaio and Mecham never could. But it’s also the case that McCain, the state’s most powerful Republican for the past quarter-century, commanded as much distrust as he did allegiance from the grass roots. Conservative Christians in Arizona did not readily forgive McCain for denouncing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance” during his first presidential run in 2000. McCain’s partnership with the Democrat Ted Kennedy to reform the nation’s immigration system in 2006 further alienated his conservative constituents. Another grudge was the senator’s opposition to a 2014 Arizona bill that would permit businesses to deny service to gay customers on religious grounds, insisting that in Arizona, “We welcome all people of all persuasions.”

That year, despite McCain’s status as a war hero, the Arizona G.O.P. censured him “for his continued disservice to our state and nation,” in essence accusing its best-known Republican — and the 2008 G.O.P. presidential candidate — of being a RINO. Following the censure, several McCain associates set up a political action committee called Arizona Grassroots Action and aggressively filled vacant precinct committee seats with loyalists, who in turn voted for like-minded party chairs.

Among the precinct committeemen who continued to view McCain with disfavor was a libertarian-leaning engineering technology professor at Mesa Community College named Joe Neglia. In 2012, Neglia attended the state party convention and watched with chagrin as the Republican establishment used delay tactics to deprive Ron Paul of any delegates and ensure victory for the presidential nominee Mitt Romney. “It was a day that really changed my life,” he told me in mid-July over breakfast in Tempe. “Because I thought: This can’t possibly be right. This can’t possibly happen.”

Neglia began to catalog the means by which the party establishment maintained the upper hand: how, in 2015, they brought in busloads of McCain supporters to a party meeting so that the senator would not be greeted entirely by boos; how, in 2016, they invoked an obscure rule to shut down an “Endorse Anyone but McCain” resolution. “That’s when I started studying to become a parliamentarian,” Neglia told me. “Now I’ve got the RINOs running scared, because every meeting I go to, they see me, and they know they can’t get away with anything anymore.”

A former Maricopa County G.O.P. chairwoman, Rae Chornenky, ruefully described to me how Neglia turned the tables at the state party meeting in January 2019. “We were deciding who the next state chairman would be, and Neglia threw a bomb in the middle of it,” she said. “He insisted on a roll-call vote, so that people would have to say out loud who they voted for. In politics, you don’t always want to have to do that. It’s because of that procedure that many people feel she was able to eke out her win.”

A Republican precinct committeeman outside his home in Tempe, Ariz., in July.

“She” was Kelli Ward, an osteopathic physician, Tea Party activist and state senator who unsuccessfully challenged McCain in the 2016 Senate primary and subsequently failed to win a Senate primary in 2018.(Ward would later suggest in one of her books that her loss to McCain may have been due to fraud.) “McCain was like a Mafia don,” Ward told me, “whose henchmen were willing to take out people who wouldn’t kiss his ring. That’s why it’s so painful now for his cronies, because they’re used to being rewarded for their loyalty, just like in the mob. And we are seeing a resurgence or a surge of populist grass-roots people who understand how our country was founded and are tired of that kind of machinery controlling the Republican Party.”

Ward’s evocation of mobster fealty in McCain’s circle might strike some as ironic, given her unyielding fidelity to Donald Trump, whom she first met at Mar-a-Lago in December 2017, tweeting seven months later, “Every day I thank God for @realDonaldTrump & the amazing job he is doing to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain both here at home & across the world.” In February, Ward self-published a book about the State Senate audit titled “Justified: The Story of America’s Audit” and dedicated it “to President Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America, who should still be president today.” Though the audit failed to achieve the objective of demonstrating fraud, the taxpayer-funded exercise counted as a huge win for Ward’s party organization, which raised over a million dollars during the time of the audit, far more than it did the previous year. As the G.O.P. consultant who works in Western states told me, “The audit was a tremendous windfall for the party, it was good business, the small dollar donations went through the roof.”

Ward now sits atop the state G.O.P. hierarchy, which has made her an object of carping from the grass roots, who wonder whether she is drifting away from their ideals. “Even she will violate the rules that we have,” Neglia told me, and he then went on to describe how Ward defied “Robert’s Rules of Order” in abruptly shutting down a party meeting this past January just as Neglia was trying to argue for a transparency measure. Still, Neglia remains an ally of Ward’s — “She’s definitely not a RINO,” he said — and now shares with her the view that widespread fraud tainted the 2020 election.

What persuaded Neglia, he said, was the stolen-election film polemic “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump pardoned four years ago after D’Souza pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. Neglia told me that he met D’Souza in May at the Maricopa County G.O.P.’s annual Lincoln Day lunch. “Very nice, reasonable guy,” he said. “I don’t think he has a dishonest bone in his body.”

“So I was in the movie ‘2000 Mules,’ and I’ve been on that issue nonstop,” said Charlie Kirk as he stood before a gathering of fellow Republicans at a restaurant in the Maricopa County town Goodyear on a Thursday night in July. Kirk, 28, is the leader of the Phoenix-based conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, arguably the nation’s most high-profile Trump-adjacent activist group. He was there to raise campaign funds on behalf of his Turning Point lieutenant Austin Smith, who was running in a State House primary, which he would go on to win on Aug. 2. (Smith, in his brief stump speech that night, paid tribute to Trump announcing his presidential bid in 2015 as “a guy with golden hair coming down a golden escalator to save our country.”) But after a few perfunctory words of support for Smith, Kirk — an accomplished orator who combines earnestness, comic timing and doomful soothsaying in one smooth and youthful package— proceeded to describe, unhinged from the fact-based world, how America in general and Arizona in particular rested on a knife edge of anarchy.

“We’ve taught our kids to hate themselves, hate the country and believe there is no God,” Kirk told the audience. “And we wonder why our country’s falling apart.” Kirk told the crowd he knew who was responsible: the Democrats. “They want 7,000 illegals across the border to come into our country every day. They want C.R.T. They want this graphic transgenderism in our schools.” As with Kari Lake’s good-versus-evil formulation, Kirk went on to describe the stakes in zero-sum terms: “There’s no compromise when you want to teach 8-year-olds transgender sexual education. I’m sorry, there’s no bargaining. There’s no compromise here. I’m just going to have to get more votes than you, and we’re going to have to defeat you.”

Kirk helped start Turning Point USA in 2012. His organization did not take long to become one of the nation’s leading promoters of political disinformation. During the 2016 presidential election, a study conducted for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found, memes created by Kirk’s group were amplified by the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency as part of Russia’s effort to aid Trump’s candidacy. Two years later, according to an investigation by The Guardian, Kirk’s organization contracted an Arizona digital marketing firm, Rally Forge, to promote deceptive messages on Facebook with the apparent objective of persuading some Democratic voters to peel away and side with Green Party candidates, as was the case in 2016, when Jill Stein’s vote totals in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin exceeded Trump’s margin of victory in those three swing states.

‘In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy. I’ve been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out?’

In 2020, The Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action (an affiliate of Turning Point USA) commissioned Rally Forge to churn out disinformation about Covid and election security, using a Phoenix-based campaign likened to a troll farm that included teenagers as employees. That same year, Rally Forge’s chief executive, Jake Hoffman, was banned from Twitter. He was also elected to Arizona’s Legislature and was among the group of Arizona Republicans who, with Kelli Ward, proclaimed themselves to be electors in seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat. Hoffman is now vice-chairman of the state’s House Committee on Government and Elections and on primary night became a G.O.P. nominee for the State Senate.

The effect of disinformation on the growing extremism of Arizona’s conservative activist community was described to me by a former state Republican operative who asked not to be named so that he could speak candidly about a trend he found to be disturbing. He told me that he frequently received emails from several of the state’s conservative precinct committeepersons. “I’ve never known a group of people, many of whom I genuinely liked, to be so misinformed,” the former operative told me. “I wish I could send you a file of memes that I’ve seen from them over the years. They’re lies or half-truths designed to incite rage. So, what ends up happening is you start to get all these clustered groups that start to spread disinformation, but they’re also the same people that are the root source of power in Arizona’s political system, which is the local precinct committee.”

Arizona, the former operative said, is particularly susceptible to the churn of disinformation, owing to its large population of retirees. “These are all folks that have traded in their suit pants for sweatpants,” he said. “They’re on the golf course, or they’re in hobby mode. They have more than enough time on their hands. They’re digesting six to 10 hours of Fox News a day. They’re reading on Facebook. They’re meeting with each other to talk about those headlines. And they’re outraged that, ‘Can you believe that the government is lying to us about this?’”

At the event held in Prescott by the Lions of Liberty, I asked Rose Sperry, the G.O.P. state committeewoman, which information outlet she most trusted. She immediately replied, “OAN” — One America News, the Trump-touting network that provided daily coverage of “America’s Audit” in Arizona even as one of its show hosts, Christina Bobb, was helping to raise funds for and directly coordinate the operation between the Trump team and state officials.

One guest on OAN’s heavy rotation over the past year has been the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, who appeared on a broadcast last September to discuss the State Senate audit of the 2020 election, accompanied by a chyron that read, “Exposing the Crime of the Century.” In July, I drove to Fountain Hills, where Finchem was speaking at a candidate forum hosted by the Republican Women of the Hills. Finchem sidled up to the microphone with a pistol conspicuously strapped to his right hip. After describing his work history in law enforcement, the private sector and Arizona politics, he then offered a different sort of qualification. With a grin, Finchem said, “The Atlantic put out a piece yesterday: I’m the most dangerous person to democracy in America.”

The article Finchem was referring to did not designate him “the most dangerous person” — but rather as one of “dozens” of election-denying candidates who “present the most significant threat to American democracy in decades.” Regardless, the notion of Arizona’s G.O.P. secretary of state front-runner as a threat to democracy was received rapturously. Several women in the audience yelled out “Whooo!” and applauded.

Throughout Arizona’s 2022 political season, the proactive denigration of democracy among Republicans became a chorus that was impossible to ignore in meetings, speeches and rallies across the state. “By the way,” Charlie Kirk made a point of saying at the fund-raiser in Goodyear, “we don’t have a democracy. OK? Just to fact check. We’re a republic.”At a gathering in Mesa that I attended in July, held by the conservative group United Patriots AZ, the evening’s host, Jeffrey Crane, asked the audience, “Are we a democracy?” They responded loudly: “Nooooo! Republic!”

In each case, the very notion of democracy was raised not so much to win a scholarly point but rather to shine a spotlight on it as an offending object. When I mentioned this emerging antagonism to McCain’s longtime state director, Bettina Nava, she was genuinely stunned. Reflecting on her former boss’s brand of conservatism, Nava told me: “At the root of it all was his deep belief in the experiment of democracy. When I was his state director, we met with everybody. And there were times when it was perfectly friendly and others where it was contentious. But he never shied away from it, because disagreement didn’t equal hate.”Nava feared for the Republican Party she once served. “In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy,” she said. “I’ve been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out? Are we the Whigs?”

Nava was describing a democracy reliant on a notion of comity that was no longer in evidence.As McCain’s grip on Arizona waned, Arizona conservatives began gradually to part ways with his beloved democratic experiment. That experiment had worked in the past, so long as the democratic principles in question redounded to the benefit of the state’s ruling conservative base. Arizona Republican legislators led the way three decades ago in championing early voting, and Republican voters overwhelmingly chose to cast their ballots by mail, at least until the 2020 election. But by Primary Day in August, many Arizona Republicans had come to view such conveniences, against all evidence, as a trap laid by a wily leftist conspiracy bent on engineering Democratic victories.

I spent that morning visiting about a dozen voting centers throughout deeply conservative Yavapai County, from Black Canyon City to Yarnell to Congress. Outside the Cottonwood Bible Church, a young bearded man in a camouflage shirt politely greeted every voter with a fistful of ballpoint pens he had purchased for the occasion. “I know they were passing out the felt-tip pens last election and not all the votes counted,” the young man said, referring to the disproved claim that election workers in Maricopa County sought to invalidate Republican ballots in 2020 by forcing voters to use Sharpies. “I just wanted to do my part.”

At a voting center in Clarkdale, three senior citizens, all G.O.P. precinct committeepersons, sat in folding chairs directly in front of the town’s only voting drop box a few yards away. When a car idled up, they craned their necks to see whether the driver was trying to stuff the box with multiple ballots, which “2,000 Mules” claimed was a frequent tactic. Two hours into their vigil, there had been no suspicious activity.

One of them, a woman named Sandy Jenocovich, led me to a nearby booth they had set up. It included leaflets for the conservative candidates they favored, as well as free copies of the Constitution, “in case anybody wants one, not that the Democrats go by it, because they certainly don’t,” she snorted. I asked Jenocovich about the hostility toward democracy I had heard voiced throughout Arizona. Nodding, she replied: “Well to me, what a democracy is, is like 51 percent of the people can decide that they want my property, and they can take it. Where a constitutional republic is: No, you can’t do that.” The three precinct committeepersons agreed that Republicans needed to “take it back” in 2022, lest critical race theory become embedded in school curriculums and children be urged to change their gender on a whim.

That evening, at Lake’s election-watch party in Scottsdale, the ebullient gathering — many of the attendees young and wearing date-night attire — grew restive as her opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, held onto a commanding lead for several hours. Having been told for the past two years that early voting was rife with corruption, Lake’s supporters had mostly cast their ballots on Primary Day, and the totals were slow to come in. The candidate finally emerged onstage at close to 11 to assure the crowd that Primary Day’s voters were breaking her way — adding, “There is no path to victory for my opponent.”

Then Lake’s speech took a conspiratorial turn. “This is how they do it. They want to try to take you down in this movement. They don’t want you to celebrate.”

It wasn’t clear who “they” were in Lake’s scenario. By that point, there were news reports of widespread problems in Republican-dominated Pinal County, just to the south of Maricopa County. A miscalculation by election officials there had resulted in a shortage of ballots in several precincts, with some 750 voters being turned away (though most if not all were given the opportunity to vote later that day). “What in the hell is going on?” Lake exclaimed. To many in the audience, the question itself was enough and did not require an answer. Any glitch or ambiguity on voting day would be sufficient to dispute any future election results that did not emphatically produce the outcome desired by the ascendant reactionary right.

“That’s a compromised election,” Mark Finchem, the secretary of state candidate, said to me of Pinal County. “These are people who were disenfranchised.” He had arrived at Lake’s party after his own victory was all but assured. I approached him after he finished an interview with a reporter for the far-right outlet Real America’s Voice.Finchem told me that he had spent part of the day monitoring a voting center. I said that I had encountered other such monitors north of here. Given their prevalence, I asked him, was there any reason at all to suspect anything more devious than human error in Pinal County? Finchem thought for a second as beads of sweat rolled down from underneath his cowboy hat. Then, grimly, he answered.

“Everything is suspect right now.”

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer. His latest book, “Sorry for the War,” is about the American disconnect with war.

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2022 wacko-rama

although Arizona has gone from being a deep red state to being a swing state, the Arizona GOP has not responded by purging itself of extremists. In fact, far-right MAGA conspiracy theorists like Kelli Ward (who chairs the Arizona Republican Party), gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (a former television news anchor) and Rep. Paul Gosar have becoming increasingly prominent in Arizona politics. And Arizona Republic opinion columnist Phil Boas, in his June 2 column, has a recommendation for the Arizona GOP: ditch the MAGA extremists and return to a more traditional Barry Goldwater/John McCain type of conservatism.

Lake, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, and Ward have been aggressive promoters of the Big Lie — falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Such “whackadoodles,” Boas writes, have been a thorn in the side of non-MAGA conservatives like former Sen. Jeff Flake.

“In Arizona, the whackadoodles took control of the Arizona Republican Party a decade before Trump,” Boas explains. “They were loud and eccentric and loved to censure John McCain. But they were never trusted with more power than, say, your average hamster, so they were perfectly adorable andeasily ignored. That changed when the Maricopa County Republican Party invited Donald Trump to speak at the Arizona Biltmore in 2015.”

Boas adds, “Trump then was still considered a pretender in the race for the White House, and his sometimes crude comments led more powerful Republicans such as U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake to protest.”

McCain, a Barry Goldwater disciple who died in 2018, was a scathing critic of Trump and the MAGA movement. And in 2018, Flake — obviously frustrated by the MAGA extremists who had taken over his party — decided not to seek reelection. That seat is now held by a centrist Democrat: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has been a frequent source of frustration to the progressive wing of her party but gets along well with members of the McCain family — including John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain and his daughter, Republican activist Meghan McCain, a former co-host of ABC’s “The View.”

Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat — the one once held by Goldwater and later, McCain — is also held by a centrist Democrat: Sen. Mark Kelly, who is up for reelection in the 2022 midterms. A state that was, for many years, synonymous with Goldwater/McCain conservatism now has two Democratic U.S. senators.

Boas notes that Lake and Ward have become “the most visible evangelists of Trump Republicanism in Arizona,” arguing that both of them have been terrible for the Arizona GOP.

But Boas stresses that the type of MAGA extremism that Lake and Ward champion was recently rebuked in some GOP primaries in Georgia, where incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp defeated a Trump-backed challenger, former Sen. David Perdue, by a whopping 52%. And incumbent Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was victorious as well, defeating his challenger, Rep. Jody Hice, by 18%.

Perdue and Hice, like Lake in Arizona, campaigned on the Big Lie.

“In Georgia, a state long considered a peer to Arizona because of its demographic similarities, the old-school Republicans stomped Trump candidates for governor, secretary of state and attorney general,” Boas observes. “Brian Kemp won reelection as Georgia governor, beating Trump errand boy David Perdue by 52 points. That’s not a landslide. That’s a collision of planets, an exploding ball of flame that can still be seen through the drapes at Mar-a-Lago.

Boas adds, “If you’ve been buying what the Arizona GOP televangelists have been selling, this might be a good time to short.”

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arizona’s political landscape has changed considerably from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. On one hand, Arizona — once a deep red state that was synonymous with the GOP conservatism of Sen. Barry Goldwater and his successor, Sen. John McCain — has evolved into a swing state. But on the other hand, Arizona’s far right has become increasingly dangerous. And Arizona-based journalist Katya Schwenk describes some of those dangers in an article published by the Phoenix New Times on January 11.

The fact that Arizona has become more Democrat-friendly than it was in the past is evident in some statewide victories of the late 2010s and early 2020s. The state now has two Democratic U.S. senators: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly. And President Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020’s presidential election. But Arizona still isn’t a deep blue state like California or Massachusetts. Gov. Doug Ducey is a conservative Republican, and Sinema and Kelly are centrists. Sinema, a frequent source of frustration to Democratic progressives, has often praised McCain as her hero and is on very friendly terms with his daughter: GOP activist Meghan McCain, formerly of the popular ABC talk show “The View.”

Meanwhile, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party is Kelli Ward, a far-right MAGA extremist who hated John McCain and considered him a RINO: Republican In Name Only. Ward is so far to the right that if Goldwater were a young Republican in 2022, she would surely consider him a liberal or a RINO — which is ironic in light of the fact that during the 1960s and 1970s, Goldwater was considered an arch-conservative.

Ward is hardly the only MAGA Republican in Arizona who is pushing an extremist agenda. Anti-vaxxer Kari Lake, who appears to the frontrunner in Arizona’s 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, is right out of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Lauren Boebert school of MAGA lunacy. And as Schwenk’s article shows, some Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature are becoming increasingly unhinged.

Schwenk explains, “Felony charges for providing healthcare for transgender youth, a statewide ‘Donald J. Trump Day’ holiday, hundreds of millions in funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall — these are just a few bills that the Arizona legislature will be considering in the coming months…. Whether such legislation will successfully wind its way through House and Senate committees is more of an unknown. Although Republicans hold a trifecta in Arizona — control of both chambers and the governor’s office — their majorities in both the House and the Senate are relatively slim.”

Nonetheless, the fact that MAGA Republicans are even proposing such bills in the first place is troubling. Darrell Hill, policy director for the Arizona American Civil Liberties Union, told the Phoenix New Times, “We’re seeing a lot of ‘culture war’ bills, a lot of bills that would impact the civil rights of Arizonans — and we’re worried.”

Democrat Rebecca Rios, former minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives, told the New Times, “The current Arizona GOP have turned into extremists who care more about attacking democracy, attacking our teachers and schools, and working on bills like ‘Donald Trump Day.’”

One of the extremist bills sponsored by Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers, a MAGA Republican and member of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, is Arizona Senate Bill 1047. If it passed, Schwenk notes, “Schools could face thousands in civil penalties if they do not display American flags in every classroom and recite the pledge of allegiance.”

“It’s already law in Arizona that public schools must display a large American flag in each classroom and display, next to it, a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Schwenk observes. “Schools must also set aside time to recite the National Anthem each day. But SB 1047…. would cause schools to face thousands of dollars in fines for violations of any of those requirements. The Arizona Attorney General would be directed to collect up to $1000 in civil penalties from schools — for every violation identified.”

Under the Rogers-sponsored Arizona Senate Bill 1045, Schwenk notes, “Any health professional that provides gender-affirming care to trans youth could be charged with a felony.”

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In addition to supporting QAnon, Finchem has aggressively promoted the Big Lie— Trump’s false and debunked claim that he really won the 2020 election but was robbed of his victory because of widespread voter fraud. One recount after another has made it abundantly clear that now-President Joe Biden legitimately won that election; in fact, he defeated Trump by more than 7 million votes. Regardless, Finchem continues to promote Trump’s bogus election fraud claims.

The January 15 MAGA rally will feature an extremist who’s-who of far-right Big Lie promoters, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell; Kelli Ward, who chairs the Arizona GOP; Rep. Paul Gosar (who was censured by House Democrats for posting an animated video that depicted him murdering Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Rep. Andy Biggs and Kari Lake, a former Fox anchor who is running for governor.

Arizona vote 'audit' sinks deeper into insanity as state GOP chair threatens her own officials with arrest

Brad Reed Raw Story

May 20, 2021

The Trump-backed "audit" of the 2020 election in Arizona is sinking deeper into madness, as Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward this week threatened her own party's officials with arrest.

2. DeSantis Moderated Racist Alt-Right Facebook Group

One can tell a lot about politicians by the company they keep, and DeSantis’ company has not only included Horowitz’ Restoration Weekend, but also, an alt-right Facebook group that calls itself Tea Party, has about 97,000 members and has also been full of racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam comments. The Facebook group, which DeSantis has moderated, is not establishment Republican by any means—and its other administrators have ranged from Corey Stewart (the Virginia senatorial candidate who has been praising Confederate Army figures like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson) to Kelli Ward (who lost to establishment pick Martha McSally in Arizona’s recent GOP senatorial primary). The late Arizona Sen. John McCain was often called a RINO (Republican In Name Only) in that group, and in a 2016 post, far-right activistMichael Ward (Kelli Ward’s husband) claimed that McCain was a “strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

AN no lnx

dr. Kelli Ward, a former Republican state lawmaker in the race to take retiring Arizona Senator Jeff Flake's seat late Monday morning posted a tweet apparently mocking the death of the late Senator John McCain.

"Political correctness is like a cancer!" Ward tweeted, literally less than 48 hours after Senator McCain passed away from brain cancer.

Last week Ward had complained that McCain timed the announcement that he was ending treatment for brain cancer late last week to coincide with the start of her campaign's bus tour, thus hurting her campaign. Ward challenged McCain in the 2016 GOP primary, but lost to him by double-digits.

While Ward claims she is not part of the alt-right, she has embraced some of its leaders, including provocateur and "PizzaGate" promoter Mike Cernovich, whom she campaigned with last week. She once embraced neo-Nazi and white supremacist Republican candidate Paul Nehlen, before distancing herself from him later.

And she has been endorsed by Rand Paul, who is becoming increasingly pro-Russia.

"Cernovich’s promotion of violent misogyny and defense of rape were the drivers of his rise to public view," the Southern Poverty Law Center reports. According to the SPLC, Cernovich has written, "diversity is code for white genocide," and this:

“Next time, don’t settle for the make out. If possible, at least pull out your dick. If you can get her to touch it, even better. If not, just let her know that your cock is too swollen to go back into your jeans, and that, ‘either you’re taking care of this, or I am.’ Masturbating will set your anchor nearer the desired destination – pussy [s]port.”

—“When in Doubt, Whip it Out,” www.dangerandplay.com, February 2012

Ward was blasted on social media for her tweet mocking the late Arizona Republican Senator and war hero.

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

Fred G. Sanford

@uglyauntesther

Translation: It's hard trying to not mock people dying of brain cancer.

9:04 AM - Aug 27, 2018

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Yashar Ali ??

@yashar

Arizona’s senior senator just passed away due to brain cancer and a candidate for Senate in Arizona just tweeted this...

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

8:35 AM - Aug 27, 2018

2,465

1,152 people are talking about this

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Bakari Sellers

@Bakari_Sellers

And for you, self awareness must be like a unicorn.

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

8:47 AM - Aug 27, 2018

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135 people are talking about this

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John Aravosis ????

@aravosis

John McCain died of cancer not two days ago.

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

8:22 AM - Aug 27, 2018

33 people are talking about this

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Garrett Ventry

@GarrettVentry

Delete your campaign

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

8:28 AM - Aug 27, 2018

100

24 people are talking about this

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Calvin

@calvinstowell

Yet the second someone calls you a name you cry and say you're being bullied.

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

8:24 AM - Aug 27, 2018

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Molly Jong-Fast

@MollyJongFast

And “Doctor” Kelli likes war heroes who didn’t get fatal brain cancer and who aren’t dead. Sad!

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

9:00 AM - Aug 27, 2018

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Ally Maynard

@missmayn

She should have her medical license revoked.https://twitter.com/kelliwardaz/status/1034097219752742912 …

Dr. Kelli Ward

@kelliwardaz

Political correctness is like a cancer!

8:51 AM - Aug 27, 2018

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Trump is not the only Republican to be spitting on the memory of Sen. John McCain—it’s a long list, and one that includes all three candidates for U.S. Senate in McCain’s home state of Arizona. Felonious former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, former state Sen. Kelli Ward,and Rep. Martha McSally have all embraced Trump and rejected McCain, along with retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, who they’re all hoping to replace.

Ward’s suggestion that McCain announced he was stopping cancer treatment to steal her thunder as she began a campaign bus tour wasn't her first such classy moment, and while she deleted her “it’s all about me” moment from Facebook and expressed pro forma condolences for McCain’s death, she hasn’t backed off much: “As of Sunday afternoon, Ward’s campaign website bore no mention of McCain’s death, and was still promoting an old statement that calls him ‘a problem for President Trump’s agenda.’”

For his part, Arpaio pivoted from praising John McCain to complaining that Cindy McCain had blocked him on Twitter. McSally has managed to avoid overt offense since it became clear that McCain’s death was imminent, but just a couple weeks ago:

McCain’s daughter Meghan was sharply critical of the congresswoman this month after she mimicked Trump and neglected to mention the full name of the “John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act.”

“McSally’s inability to even mention my father’s name when discussing the bill named in his honor is disgraceful (just as it was with Trump). I had such higher hopes for the next generation of leadership in my home state,” Meghan McCain wrote.

This is today’s Republican Party. They’re petty and mean-spirited to the bitter end if you’re not one of their own—and the list of who’s one of their own is shrinking fast as Republicans move from targeting poor people and non-white people to targeting their own elected officials if they commit the sins of criticizing Donald Trump or insufficiently loathing all non-Republicans at all times.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/25/mccain-ward-criticism-arizona-796145

Ward keeps up criticism of McCain after health announcement

By JAMES ARKIN 08/25/2018 12:24 PM EDT

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PHOENIX — Arizona Republican Kelli Ward continued her criticism of Sen. John McCain on the campaign trail on Friday — hours after McCain’s family announced that he was discontinuing his medical treatment for brain cancer.

“We have a choice. Are we going to elect another senator cut from the same cloth as Jeff Flake and John McCain?” Ward said at two separate campaign events Friday afternoon. Both times, the crowds responded: “No!”

McCain’s family announced Friday that the senator, who was diagnosed last summer with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, was halting his medical treatment, signaling his battle with the disease was in its final stages.

Ward, who challenged McCain in a 2016 primary, is one of three Republicans on the ballot for Tuesday’s primary to be the Republican nominee to replace Flake, who is retiring. On her campaign bus between the two events, Ward told reporters McCain’s situation was “very, very sad.”

“We have to keep him and the family in our prayers. It’s just a sad thing,” she said. But she didn’t back away from her criticisms of the senator.

“I’m sorry that he’s sick. It’s a horrible thing. But that doesn’t mean that his policies suddenly became good. They didn’t,” she said.

“There’s Sen. McCain the person, and I feel very bad for him and his family, but there’s also Sen. McCain the politician who has let down Arizona again and again and again,” Ward told reporters. “I can separate the two, and I hope you all can, too.”

Ward took just under 40 percent of the vote against McCain in the 2016 Republican Senate primary. Ward attacked McCain’s age during that primary, saying at the time he might not live to finish his term in office.

Earlier this week, Ward tweeted that the immigration policies of McCain, Flake and Rep. Martha McSally, one of her opponents in Tuesday’s Senate primary, contributed to the death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts. Tibbetts’ death became a national issue this week when the authorities announced that the suspect charged in her murder was an undocumented immigrant.

Ward continued that critique Friday.

“He’s been there since he promised Ronald Reagan that he would secure the border if amnesty was granted all the way back to 1986,” she said of McCain. “It didn’t happen then, and unfortunately we are still seeing these tragedies again and again and again.”