DeWit's Bribery Blunder

The holy grail of secret recordings ... Double vision in D.C ... And a Dennis Quaid sighting at the state Capitol.

AZGOP Chair Jeff DeWit did, in fact, try to bribe Kari Lake to get out of politics in an incredibly ill-advised meeting where he repeatedly asked her not to tell anyone and she wore a wire to secretly record the whole thing.¹ 

Yesterday, Lake leaked the tape.

“There are very powerful people who want to keep you out, and what they’re willing to do is put their money where their mouth is in a big way,” he told her, according to an audio tape that the Daily Mail got ahold of² that could have only come from Lake herself. 

The tape offers a stunning view of backroom politics and showcases an embarrassingly stupid move from DeWit, who just yesterday forcefully denied that it happened. But most of all, it’s a truly hilarious exchange that united Arizonans across the political spectrum with bewilderment and giggles yesterday.

Republicans who have no particular beef with DeWit were enthralled with his immolation, while Democrats joyously celebrated the most recent demise of the state’s GOP. 

Lake sat on the tape for nearly a year, dropping it just before Donald Trump’s fundraising rally Friday and the AZGOP annual meeting Saturday amid a brewing pressure campaign to get DeWit to resign. 

Love her or hate her — there’s no denying Lake knows how to command a news cycle.

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Lake mastered the timing for this secret recording drop, but there’s no time like the present to support local news.

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The recording sealed DeWit’s fate as AZGOP chair. The only big question is whether he’ll slink out the back door before this Saturday’s annual AZGOP meeting or be thrown out. The latter would make for a better show. 

Setting aside the ethics of attempting to bribe her, the incredible naiveté with which DeWit approached a former news anchor known to wear a wire to the airport and asked her not to tell anyone shows he’s not qualified to run a political party. 

But offering a candidate a “bribe” — usually in the form of a cushy job — to walk away from a race isn’t illegal or even uncommon. Suggesting a more lucrative alternative than public office is a tried and true strategy to clear the field, as several politicos noted. Some would argue that a party chair has a duty to try to weed out toxic candidates.

DeWit just managed to make it sound as shady as possible. And he did it all on tape.

It doesn’t take a NASA CFO to realize that Lake was never going to take the bait and that she was definitely going to wear a wire to that meeting. Yet the former NASA CFO seemed to truly believe he could walk away from that meeting with no hard feelings.

“If you say no, don’t tell people,” he tells Lake several times, though she never directly promises to stay quiet.

So what does this hilarious episode portend for the future of the Arizona Republican Party? 

When he won the chairmanship last year, DeWit was seen as a consensus candidate, perhaps the only person who could unify both the MAGA wing of the party and the mainstream business donor class. 

But the two sides have been at war for a long time, and DeWit hasn’t been the great uniter or rainmaker some had hoped. He’s too MAGA for the mainstream, too mainstream for the MAGA. He’s a man without a party, figuratively and soon literally. 

But considering the AZGOP has been a rolling disaster for years, most mainstream Republicans weren’t particularly worried about DeWit losing the chairmanship to some “Patriot Party” challenger. They’ve given up on the party infrastructure anyway. 

All eyes now turn to the Trump rally Friday and the AZGOP meeting Saturday — how the former president will react to the news is anyone’s guess. 

But we can say two things for certain: DeWit must have been out of his mind to believe he could attempt to bribe Lake without it becoming public, and the AZGOP is only going to get crazier with DeWit’s departure. 

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Room for two?: After Arizona lawmakers proposed placing a statue of Sandra Day O'Connor in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall, the former Supreme Court Justice’s son told Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy a federal bill passed in 2022 has already paved the way for his mom’s statue at the Capitol. Scott O’Connor said he told Rep. Matt Gress, the sponsor of the legislation for Arizona’s push for the statue, to put the money toward civics education instead. Gress said both of the O'Connor memorials should continue. 

“I think it makes the state look pretty uninformed to propose that when there is already a statue being proposed,” Scott O’Connor said.  

How CRT became mainstream: Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute brought Critical Race Theory outrage to the mainstream through 11 “narrative plots” that policymakers honed, researchers from Michigan State University and the University at Albany found, per The Hechinger Report’s Javeria Salman. The most common narrative is that CRT indoctrinates kids to feel bad about their race, and since 2021, 44 states have introduced more than 140 anti-CRT laws or bans, including Arizona. The study showed white people who’d heard all the narratives had a 73% chance of supporting a CRT ban. 

Shroom for improvement: A bill that would protect the $5 million for psilocybin research lawmakers approved last year passed a House committee, but bill sponsor Rep. Kevin Payne now faces the battle of saving the funds from sweeps amid a widening budget deficit, Marijuana Moment's Kyle Jaeger reports. Meanwhile, only one of the 26 original social equity licensees owns and controls a dispensary after Arizona’s 2020 recreational marijuana law created the licensing program to promote dispensary ownership among those disproportionately impacted by previous weed laws. Multistate corporations control the other 25, and many previous holders fell victim to predatory financial schemes, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. 

Power struggle: Native American tribes are asking a federal judge to halt work on the $10 billion SunZia transmission line being built in the San Pedro River Valley to supply wind-powered energy as far away as California, per the Associated Press. The lawsuit accuses the U.S. Interior Department and Bureau of Land Management of refusing to recognize the cultural and historical significance of the land being used for the line. Meanwhile, one of the first uranium mines to open in the U.S. in eight years just began operations seven miles south of the Grand Canyon despite concerns from the Havasupai Tribe that it could contaminate its sole source of drinking water, the Guardian’s Maanvi Singh reports. 

Conservative clash: Tensions are rising in the upcoming Republican primary race for the Senate seat in Legislative District 17 as social conservative Sen. Justine Wadsack faces Vince Leach, who used to hold her seat, in the competitive northern Pima County district. The battle highlights a larger conversation about dueling forms of conservatism, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer notes, given Wadsack’s anti-mask, book-banning brand opposed to Leach’s business community interests. 

Gen Z isn’t watching your TV ads: Democratic super PAC Priorities USA is infusing $1 million into a creator program to get social media influencers to post about the 2024 elections in attempts to lure young voters to battleground states like Arizona, Politico’s Rebecca Kern reports. The PAC isn’t the first to use influencers to electioneer, but the move signals a sharp pivot into how campaigns reach voters online.

They’re not nunchakus: A teen who was attacked with brass knuckles by a member of the "Gilbert Goons" is calling on lawmakers to regulate the use of the weapon. Republican Sen. John Kavanagh told the Republic’s Laura Daniella Sepulveda and Robert Anglen that he’ll sponsor the bill to outlaw them, and that brass knuckles are “totally different” from guns.

United front: Gov. Katie Hobbs joined a group of eight other Democratic governors to urge President Joe Biden to address “a humanitarian crisis” on the southern border, and wrote in a letter to the White House: “It is clear our national immigration system is outdated and unprepared to respond to this unprecedented global migration,” The New York Times’ Grace Ashford reports. 

Elephant in the room: The number of Arizona’s registered voters dropped by about 100,000 since the summer of 2023, according to a quarterly report from Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, per the Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel. As of Jan. 2, about 35% of registered voters were Republicans, 34% had no party preference and about 30% were Democrats. 

The House Committee on Land, Agriculture and Rural Affairs committee voted 6-3 to approve Rep. Quang Nguyen’s bill that prohibits anyone from branding a product as livestock or poultry if it didn’t come from a dead animal, even though the FDA already requires a label for cell-cultured products.  

Did you listen to that Kari Lake / Jeff DeWit tape at the top? Clearly, that’s today’s laugh.

But if you readers really need another dose of lol to make it through the day, check out the first few minutes of the Sen. David Farsnworth’s Transporation, Infrastructure and Missing Children Committee. It opened with a trailer of a Dennis Quaid film, which wouldn’t be the worst thing, except this wasn’t one of his Hollywood hits, it’s a conspiratorial documentary about potential threats to the United States’ energy grid. 

“As many as 90% of Americans could die,” the film declares. 

And if that’s how the committee starts, you know it’s only getting weirder from there.

Scroll to the 10-minute mark to see two infomercials for flying sports cars! Farnsworth wants to make them street-legal in Arizona.

1. We’d just like to point out that the secret recording would be illegal in Arizona under Republican Rep. David Cook’s HB2038.

2. We hate to send you to the Daily Mail website, but in this case, it’s worth the click.