The Daily Agenda: Give them a fair trial!
The Daily Agenda: Give them a fair trial!
Then lock them up ... Just cross your arms and smirk ... And your puffer vests are our cowboy hats.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal investigation into efforts to steal the 2020 election from the rightful winner is heating up, and officials have their sights trained on former President Donald Trump and the fake elector scheme.
The DOJ subpoenas for Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, Sen. Kelly Townsend and Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward a few weeks back were the first sign that federal authorities were getting deep into the fake electors scheme1 in Arizona, where several elected officials were central to the plot to overthrow Joe Biden’s election victory.
But a pair of reports out of the Washington Post and New York Times yesterday show just how far along that probe is and how deeply involved Arizona politicos were in efforts to overturn the election results.
The Times got ahold of dozens of emails detailing the “desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack.” But the emails from Jack Wilenchik, the attorney for the Arizona Republican Party who helped organize Arizona’s slate of fake electors (and who authored the “bad faith” lawsuit against the 2020 election), were the highlight.
“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Wilenchik wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign.
That’s some embarrassingly bad lawyering that he later tried to correct in an email stating that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes. ☺” (The emoji was his.) He also acknowledged that the votes “aren’t legal under federal law” but said there was “no harm in it (legally at least).”
The Post yesterday followed that blockbuster with its own bombshell report declaring that prosecutors have been questioning witnesses in recent days about the extent of Trump’s involvement in the fake elector scheme and his pressure campaign to get former Vice President Mike Pence to go along with it, and they’ve been collecting phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration. It’s the first time prosecutors seem to be zeroing in on Trump himself.
The Post noted that the DOJ’s criminal investigation has two tracks: One focusing on “seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct a government proceeding” relating to the Jan. 6 attacks, and the other focusing on “potential fraud associated with the false-electors scheme.” It’s important to remember the issue of fake electors and the Jan. 6 riot are inextricably linked. Both had the same goal: to throw into chaos Congress’ certification of Biden as the winner of the election on Jan. 6, 2021.
But neither track is a slam dunk against Trump or his allies in Arizona who attempted to steal the election from Biden, the Post noted.
“Any investigation surrounding the effort to undo the results of the election must navigate complex issues of First Amendment-protected political activity and when or whether a person’s speech could become part of an alleged conspiracy in support of a coup,” the Post wrote, noting that many probes of this kind end quietly without charges.
Trump and some of his allies have endorsed killing those they believe stole the election or wouldn’t go along with their plot to steal it. We’ll just say those who attempted to overturn the outcome of the election, jeopardize democracy and disregard the will of the people deserve their day in court.
What if, and hear us out, they’re all right?: The Republic’s Tara Kavaler profiles the mud-wrestling GOP primary in Arizona’s First Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. David Schweikert is gaybaiting and accusing his opponent of running a scam business, and Elijah Norton is accusing Schweikert of being a “corrupt” politician. Election denier Josh Barnett is also running.
More like ACL-sue: The ACLU is threatening to sue the Arizona Department of Corrections after it barred prisoners from receiving The Nation, a liberal magazine. As the Republic’s Jimmy Jenkins notes, it wouldn’t be the first time the department has faced lawsuits for censoring media to incarcerated people: In 2019 it lost a suit over barring Prison Legal News, and in 2021 it lost a suit over confiscating Kendrick Lamar CDs, Jenkins notes.
“The issues banned by the department included a cover story entitled ‘Black Immigrants Matter.’ Another issue that was banned for sexual content contained a photo of a drag queen as well as a cartoon of two people kissing,” Jenkins writes.
She didn’t say it wasn’t not stolen: Republican gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson is once again taking fire for her less-than-forthright stance on whether the 2020 election was stolen after this cringey interview in which CNN’s Brianna Keilar just keeps asking about it.
Mayors for Senate: Mesa Mayor John Giles and Peoria Mayor Cathy Carlat are facing the wrath of their local legislative district Republican committees after endorsing U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly. Both received censures from their local LDs recently after their names showed up on a “Republicans for Kelly” website. Expect to see a lot more censures for those Republicans on Team Kelly, LD28 Republican chair Lori Bango told the Republic’s Sam Kmack and Maritza Dominguez.
"We were all pretty surprised seeing that 'Republicans for Kelly' page, there are a long list of them on there," Bango said. "This is probably going to be kind of a snowball type of thing, once they see a few of us do it (other GOP precincts will follow)."
Make Hawaii Australia Again?: U.S. Senate hopeful Jim Lamon once told radio host Seth Leibsohn that he wants to send illegal immigrants “out to the Pacific Ocean” for “five years of hard labor” crushing rocks and “making them into gravel for their food.” It’s an old interview, but Jason Salzman just flagged it in the Copper Courier.
Hey, we remember that name!: Congressional Democrats want Joseph Cuffari, the DHS Inspector General, to recuse himself from his office’s investigation into the Secret Service erasing texts from around the time of the Jan. 6 insurrection after they discovered he knew about the erased messages months before he disclosed it, the Washington Post reports. It’s the latest trouble in a line of troubles for the former Arizonan who served as an adviser to Govs. Jan Brewer and Doug Ducey.
We got three new paying subscribers yesterday, so we don’t have to axe our cute lil pitches. You saved local news! Now, tell your friends to pay up.
Money well spent?: After the City of Nogales opened a suspiciously timed investigation into the utility bills of a city council member turned challenger to Mayor Arturo Garino, the candidate, Jorge Maldonado, repaid the city $3,700, which is just barely enough to cover the cost of the private investigator the city hired to look into the issue, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi writes.
This story won’t have a happy ending: Remember that Flagstaff Police Department investigation into possible prostitution and human trafficking at massage parlors that predictably ended with officers getting “fondled” (and the police chief absurdly claiming the officers were victims)? Well, a member of the Flagstaff City Council is hosting a town hall with an organization representing victims of sexual trafficking, the Flagstaff Sun’s Sierra Ferguson reports. The police investigation has caught the council’s attention, and the mayor has submitted multiple public records requests about it, Ferguson writes.
Welcome to Arizona: A pair of award-winning Mexican journalists are now calling Arizona home after they were forced to flee their home in Mexico due to threats from the cartels, the Republic’s Javier Arce and Joanna Jacobo Rivera write. The couple are here on a tourist visa for now and want to bring attention to the dangers Mexican journalists face for doing their job.
This is the sign content we crave: Chandler man Tyler Watson is crossing his arms in his yard signs. He’s not running for office. Just crossing his arms. And maybe eating quesadillas for charity in the future, KJZZ reports.
The progressive vs. moderate Democratic battle is raging in the West Valley’s Legislative District 22. The Dem stronghold is flanked in the east by 39th Avenue, in the south by the Salt River, and in the west by the Agua Fria River. It stretches up to Glendale Road in the north and takes in all of Avondale and Tolleson, as well as parts of Phoenix, Goodyear and Glendale.
Democratic Reps. Richard Andrade and Diego Espinoza currently represent two neighboring districts, but both were drafted into LD22 during redistricting. They also represent the progressive/moderate divide in the Democratic Party as they square off in the district’s Democratic primary for the Senate.
Espinoza has the home court advantage, as his old LD19 covered more of the new district’s territory than Andrade’s LD29. And he’s running as a slate with his seatmates from LD19, as Sen. Lupe Contreras and Rep. Lorenzo Sierra seek the nod from Dem voters for the district’s two House seats.
They’ll face progressive activist and organizer Leezah Sun, and Natacha Chavez, a political organizer who worked for and has the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego.
The race has already included its fair share of mudslinging and accusations, as Andrade has teamed up with Sun, whose campaign manager was cited by police for tampering with Espinoza’s signs. Sun ran an unsuccessful campaign for an LD19 House seat in 2020.
We’re longtime fans of the Arizona candidate’s campaign trail uniform of cowboy hats and squeaky clean boots. In Wisconsin, the puffer vest is seemingly that state’s version of our cowboy campaign trail outfit.
There were actually two slates of fake Arizona electors. The one with AZGOP chair Kelli Ward and her husband Michael Ward, former AZGOP executive director Greg Stafsten, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, Turning Point USA’s Tyler Bowyer, Republican state Rep. Jake Hoffman former Rep. Anthony Kern and others pictured in the tweet declared themselves the real fake electors. We haven’t heard much lately about the fake fake electors, a group of “sovereign citizens from the Great State of Arizona.”