AUDIO: Hear The Arizona GOP Chair Try To Bribe Kari Lake Out Of Running For The Senate
We’d call this the most shocking thing you’ll see all year, but we know that it wouldn’t hold up to that standard. Not the way things are going.
But it’s still pretty amazing.
Jeff DeWit is the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. That organization has never been all that friendly to Kari Lake, largely because she came out of relative obscurity – politically, not in terms of name ID; she’d been a news anchor for a Phoenix TV station for quite a while before running for governor in 2022 – and upended a few of the party’s more established people to get that nomination.
Lake had that 2022 gubernatorial election stolen from her, and there were Republicans who stood by and let it happen. The election was stolen in Maricopa County, and specifically in the Republican suburbs, where ballots were deliberately printed at 95 percent size (19 inches rather than the 20-inch full size specification), so that the tabulator machines couldn’t read them. This created chaos at GOP-heavy precincts, and that resulted in long lines on Election Day.
You’ll hear Democrats talk endlessly about vote suppression. Please recognize that Democrats are classic projectionists – whatever they accuse Republicans of you can be sure they’re already doing. And what they did to Republican voters in Maricopa County in 2022 was a vigorous bit of vote suppression.
There were other shenanigans as well. Katie Hobbs, the corrupt troglodyte who was Arizona’s Secretary of State, oversaw the electoral process which stole the election from Lake, and Hobbs was the direct beneficiary.
She was the Democrat candidate for governor, after all.
The Arizona GOP should have rallied behind Lake. They haven’t. To be fair, she did make some mistakes late in the 2022 gubernatorial campaign which turned off some voters and made the election close enough to steal. And because of those mistakes you could argue that party insiders might have doubts about running her for a statewide office like the Senate.
But regardless of that Lake is pretty clearly the strongest of their candidates. And she certainly has a good shot at winning that Senate seat. The Democrat incumbent, Kyrsten Sinema, is running as an independent because her party has utterly turned on her, and the Democrats appear to be running Congressman Ruben Gallego. So the Democrat vote is going to be split.
This would be a race where you would get aggressive and nominate a firebrand conservative like Lake, and as such the voters are giving her a big lead for the GOP nomination in the early polling.
But that’s not good enough for “back East.”
Which is the term DeWit uses in this audio recording, in which he tells Lake that there are people “back East” who are “willing to put their money where their mouth is” in order to get Lake to drop out of the Senate race. He talks about corporate board seats and other fabulous benefits, and he says without saying that it’s about getting Lake to play on “their” team.
Lake notes that this is toxic for the country and DeWit acknowledges that, but you can almost hear him shrugging.
It’s a nauseating bit of audio.
If wq’re allowed to speculate a little, what this absolutely reeks of is Mitch McConnell – who has engaged in sabotage of conservatives running for Senate seats ever since he became the leader of the GOP caucus in that body.
“Back East” has to be McConnell and his pals who won’t accept a principled loose cannon like Lake; if they can’t have another milquetoast company man the “uniparty” political establishment can control, they’d just as soon let a Democrat win.
DeWit’s career has to be ruined at this point and one imagines his time as party chair for the GOP in Arizona is short. At this point he probably ought to confess and let us all know who is “back East.”
And maybe this is something the FBI might take some interest in, not that they’ve earned much faith of late. This is an outright attempt to bribe a major political candidate; you’d think that’s worth investigating.
We can’t say that this helps or hurts Lake. What we can say is it confirms a lot of our suspicions about modern American politics.
