Politicians are often egomaniacal assholes.
But getting a campaign staffer to admit that their politician is an egomaniacal asshole usually takes a few stiff drinks and a promise that we’re off the record.
Not so for Randy Clarke, the former campaign manager for Phoenix City Council candidate Michael Mazzocco, a Democrat running in a crowded race to replace Councilwoman Laura Pastor in the city’s District 4.
Clarke, who quit Mazzocco's campaign in June, recently torched it in pretty spectacular fashion: by sending an annotated dossier cataloging his beefs with his former employer — replete with transcripts documenting what Mazzocco said in meetings — to every other campaign in the race.
Clarke said he felt compelled to leave a month after his boss said he wanted to punch Clarke in the face, and two weeks after Mazzocco berated him on his birthday.
“How a candidate treats his own staff is the only unmediated thing you will ever see about him. Everything else is produced,” Clarke wrote in the cover sheet accompanying his packet.
And the unmediated, behind-the-scenes truth is what Clarke claims to be providing.
To be sure, there aren’t any allegations in Clarke’s 37-page packet that rise anywhere remotely near criminal status — but it is chock-full of the kind of ridiculous raw details that staffers usually take to their graves.
It’s not a flattering release of documents for Mazzocco, who, as it turns out, said some fairly inappropriate things about other candidates, their campaign staffers, voters, sex workers, Latinos, other gay candidates in the race and more.
Click the image to read Clarke’s dossier.
Clarke, the transcript notes, said he started working for Mazzocco because he wanted “to make a name for (himself) as a goaded campaign manager” — which we take to be a misspelling of “goated,” slang for phenomenal.
It didn’t quite turn out that way.
Clarke worked his last day at the end of June, and he released the trove of conversation transcripts last week.
“I stayed quiet for months because I was worried about backlash and about whether anyone would believe a staffer over a candidate,” he wrote. “I’d be setting a bad example for my kid if I didn’t advocate for myself.”
The race to replace Pastor, who’s wrapping up her 12th year representing midtown Phoenix and parts of Maryvale on the council, features eight nonpartisan candidates who are almost all left-leaning.
At this point, the frontrunner appears to be Ed Hermes, a commercial litigator and local school board member for whom Mazzocco harbors more than a touch of contempt.
“He’s cosplaying Latino progressive,” Mazzocco said of Hermes during a May meeting, per Clarke. “And then has his little brown kids, you know, following him like they’re, you know, tools or puppets. It’s embarrassing and it’s kind of hard to watch.”
Mazzocco, who has staked his campaign in part on being Native American and a member of the federally recognized Delaware Nation, added that he thinks Hermes’ Puerto Rican wife, Noriana, is great.
At a recent forum (which Hank moderated), Mazzocco called Hermes a career politician, though Hermes’ only political position has been an unpaid one on a school board.
And the dossier also suggests the candidate is on tape revealing a bit of a violent streak by talking trash about Glendale Council member Lupe Conchas.
“I am still going to get back up and say, you know, ‘Nice to see you, Lupe.’ And that is, in public, how I’m going to come across,” Mazzocco said in February, according to the transcript. “But behind the scenes, I want the motherfucker shot down.”
Mazzocco did add that he “would never, ever, ever act on any of that,” and the dossier notes it wasn’t an actual threat.
Nor was Mazzocco telling Clarke he wanted to punch him a real threat.
Still, several other instances reveal Mazzocco may have a bit of a hot temper, like when he told Clarke:
“I’m so livid, um, and a lot of that has to do with how I hate being fucking managed. And I know that’s your job.”
“You didn’t annoy me. You just pissed me the fuck off.”
“Fucking blatantly managing me. And I was ready to like fuck you. I don’t want to talk to you.”
He also referred to women in Phoenix walking around the 27th Avenue area known for prostitution as “downright hoochie mamas” in a colorful-if-questionable turn of phrase.
In his response to our inquiry, Mazzocco said he was aware of the dossier circulating and effectively admitted the candid comments were expressed poorly.
“Like anyone, there are things I have said in candid moments that I would phrase differently with the benefit of reflection,” he told us in a written statement. “It is important to remember that these conversations took place in the context of private campaign discussions, and individual remarks should be considered in their full context.”
Mazzocco also said Clarke “contributed some great work” on the campaign, but the two had “different perspectives about the best way to approach the campaign and communicate” his vision for the district.
“I appreciate his contributions and sincerely wish him the best,” Mazzocco said.
Ultimately, there are probably two lessons to be learned here for politicians.
For one, in an era when lots of meetings are casually recorded and transcribed with AI, maybe it’s good to use some discretion in sharing private thoughts aloud.
But more importantly, it’s probably best not to piss off your own campaign staffers if they have documentation of you saying a whole lot of embarrassing things.
That Elmer Fudd impersonation is spot-on: The error-prone federal database used by Maricopa County officials to hunt for noncitizen voters unsurprisingly came back with a faulty total, Votebeat Arizona’s Sasha Hupka reports. Earlier this year, Republican Recorder Justin Heap made a big deal out of 207 voters he flagged as noncitizens. After months of investigating 60 who Heap said had cast ballots in previous elections, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell found 52 were citizens, seven were erroneously registered when they renewed their driver’s licenses, and one filled out a paper form and marked that they were not a citizen.
What, me worry?: U.S. Attorney Timothy Courchaine pooh-poohed the concerns raised by Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes about the Trump administration using personal information of voters to track noncitizens, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. Courchaine said there was “no reason for concern” and the election data his office got from Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen in March was promptly turned over to the FBI. Fontes remains unconvinced and said his office won’t share voter rolls with the U.S. Department of Justice unless a court orders him to.
Anybody and everybody: Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton netted some cash as PACs funded by the two biggest AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, throw money at candidates, per the New York Times. The tech giants quietly pumped $56 million into congressional races this cycle for Democrats and Republicans alike, including frontrunners like Stanton. Think Big, the PAC aligned with OpenAI, gave $300,000 total to three candidates, including Stanton.
What did they know and when did they know it: Two GOP state lawmakers are pushing the Arizona Board of Regents to investigate why Arizona State University hockey player Matthew Mayich collapsed during an outdoor workout last month, Shira Tanzer reports for KTAR. Rep. Matt Gress and Sen. Hildy Angius, the chairs of the education committees in their respective chambers, want an independent investigation after seven of Mayich’s teammates said players were vomiting or could barely stand due to heatstroke.
Make it make sense: A Phoenix man who was caught up in the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda was hospitalized after he passed out in the cell of a police station in Equatorial Guinea, Emily Bregel reports for the Arizona Daily Star. Ahmed Soliman was born in Egypt, and his family moved to Phoenix when he was four years old. He has no ties to Equatorial Guinea, but Trump officials are sending immigrants to any country that will accept deportees. The central African country agreed to accept them in exchange for $7.5 million. Soliman’s lawyers in Arizona haven’t been able to talk to him, and they’re worried about the malaria and typhoid that are common in jails in Equatorial Guinea.
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Finally, it’s settled!
We checked with President Donald Trump’s new AI tool, and we have confirmation that Trump did, in fact, lose Arizona in the 2020 presidential election.
Wait… apparently we asked the question before Trump did.
Of all the urgent matters in front of our federal government, it’s good to know making sure that Trump’s chatbot acts as his lying yes-man is still on top of the list.