AZ GOP Chair Outwitted By Kari Lake, Immediately Resigns In Shame
Someone needs to go back to bribe school.
Kari Lake is a terrible candidate for the US Senate. She lost the Arizona governor’s race after underperforming Republicans across the state. She has clogged the courts with nuisance suits claiming the election was stolen from her. It’s not a shock that state Republicans might want to avoid another loss, especially when they are hankering to replace incumbent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema from the Sinema Party.
Apparently, it seems as if one Arizona Republican was desperate enough to allegedly bribe her to go away. And, Lordy, there are tapes!
The Daily Mail reported on Monday that it had obtained an audio recording that seems to reveal Arizona Republican Party Chair Jeff DeWit asking Lake to tell him what it would cost for her to stay out of politics for the next two years.
Reportedly recorded last March, when Lake was on her imaginary Arizona governor world tour, DeWit is heard asking Lake not to discuss the conversation with anyone else, which was like sending an incriminating email to someone with the subject line “DELETE!”
DEWIT(LESS): There are very powerful people who want to keep you out.
LAKE: I know they do.
DEWIT: But they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is in a big way. So this conversation never happened.
DeWit starts to say, “Is there is a number in which …” but Lake cuts him off, “I can be bought?” DeWit replies, “Not be bought … to take a pause for a couple years … and to go right back to what you’re doing.”
I’m not the lawyer in the family but this sounds like an obvious bribe. It’s an audio recording so we can’t tell if he had large sacks of cash as a visual aid. C’mon, it’s not as if he could pretend he’d fund Lake’s many charitable endeavors in exchange for her staying out of politics. Every action she’s taken over the past few years has been about shamelessly raising her political profile.
DeWit says at one point, “So the ask I got today from back east was: ‘Is there any companies out there or something that could just put her on the payroll to keep her out?’”
Lake reacts with total “I said good day, sir!” indignation — a good clue that she was performing for an audience. She claims that the Arizona Republican Party wants to get her out of the way as part of their scheme to defeat Donald Trump. She refuses to accept any money or no-show jobs.
DEWIT: If you say no, its fine, it’s your choice, don’t tell people …
LAKE: I don't want to make a deal with these kinds of people. This is a hill worth dying on. I’m not ... if they’re gonna steal the election to make me and our movement go away. I'm not letting them do that. I owe it to the people of Arizona to carry their torch and voice.
Lake had claimed at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference that someone had tried to bribe her not to run. After the Daily Mail released the recording, a newly incensed Lake told an NBC News reporter on Tuesday, “[DeWit’s] got to resign. We can’t have somebody who is corrupt and compromised running the Republican Party.” (She said these words, with no apparent self-awareness, at Trump’s New Hampshire primary victory party.)
DeWit was once Trump’s campaign COO, but MAGA has quickly abandoned him. “If this is, in fact, true, I’m asking [DeWit] to resign,” Maricopa County Republican Committee Chairman Craig Berland said.
And resign DeWit did on Wednesday. He initially took the Marion Berry approach and said Lake “set him up” and insisted he’d done nothing wrong. He claimed Lake has a “disturbing tendency to exploit private interactions for personal gain” and a “habit of secretly recording personal and private conversations.” He knew she was a snake but thought saying “don’t bite me” would do the trick.
DeWit said Lake’s people had told him to “resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording.”
“I am resigning as Lake requested,” he said, “in the hope that she will honor her commitment to cease her attacks, allowing me to return to the business sector — a field I find much more logical and prefer over politics.”
Let’s hope there’s more to his plan than “Kari Lake keeps her word.”
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Jesus she might as well have said: "Come closer and speak into the flower on my lapel."
"I cannot be bought. And I cannot be threatened. But you put the two together and I'm your man."
Norm Peterson (Cheers)