By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Kari Lake was blunt about how she views Maricopa County’s corrupt political establishment in a talk she gave the day before Arizona’s new left-wing Democrat secretary of state asked the state’s new left-wing Democrat attorney general to investigate Lake for potential violations of state law.
Lake, a veteran television news anchor who was endorsed by Donald Trump for her 2022 race for Arizona governor, is beginning to resemble Trump not only in the establishment’s frothing opposition to her but also now in legal maneuverings trying to suppress her.
On January 30 new Secretary of State Adrian Fontes asked new Attorney General Kris Mayes to investigate Lake for showing 16 mismatched voter signatures in a tweet about lack of election integrity. Images of the signatures already were public knowledge.
“I am writing today to ask you to investigate and take appropriate enforcement action against Kari Lake for potential violations of Arizona law committed under her Twitter handle, @KariLake,” with “a graphic containing images of 16 voter signatures,” Fontes wrote.
In 2020 Fontes had been defeated for re-election as the supposedly neutral Maricopa County Recorder, after controversy over his conduct allegedly to increase Democrat voter turnout.
In a story posted January 31, the Arizona Sun Times quoted Lake attorney Tim LaSota about her showing the signatures: “This information came from the Arizona Senate investigation on acceptance of clearly mismatched signatures on early ballots, and Kari Lake has an absolute right under the First Amendment to republish the information presented to the Senate.”
Taking the stage before Lake’s January 29 talk, Floyd Brown, the founder of the popular conservative Western Journal site, said that wherever he speaks in the U.S., people know about Arizona’s 2022 election and Lake, who, Brown said, has become a national leader.
Not since Ronald Reagan, Brown said, has there been someone on stage who can communicate for Republicans as well as Lake.
The way the left wing used every trick to try to stop Lake, “It was diabolical,” Brown said, adding that her abilities are what make the political left so determined to block her.
Some have compared Lake’s potential as a Republican governor with what Ron DeSantis was able to do once elected as Florida’s governor.
In fact, Brown said, despite election tricks, Lake “is our governor . . . Doesn’t that feel great?”
Not only Lake but also Trump-endorsed Republican candidates for attorney general, secretary of state, and the U.S. Senate all won their hotly contested Arizona primary races last August but supposedly lost to left-wing Democrats in the general election. Fontes had the reputation of being a fierce Democrat partisan.
Massive suppression of Republican voters in populous Maricopa County on Election Day 2022 could have caused the so-called defeats of most if not all of these GOP candidates.
One of them, Abe Hamadeh, the Republican choice for attorney general, supposedly lost to Democrat Kris Mayes by fewer than 300 votes, out of a total of more than 2.5 million cast. Statistically, each of the two received 49.9 percent of the vote.
Lake supposedly lost the governor’s race to reclusive left-wing Democrat Katie Hobbs by fewer than 18,000 votes out of a total of more than 2.5 million cast, less than one percent.
Hobbs, like Joe Biden in 2020, hid in her basement during the campaign. Despite Lake’s offer to debate her anywhere anytime, the pro-abortion radical Hobbs absolutely declined to debate even once — as if she knew she already had the election in the bag.
The GOP gubernatorial nominee told a packed hall at a Scottsdale resort on January 29 that November 8 “was a coordinated assault on our election, at the hands of our own government,” a reference to vote manipulation she said was done by paid county officeholders.
Soon after Lake took the stage, she received a call on her phone from Donald Trump, who told the audience, “Ultimately she’s going to be victorious . . . We love you all.”
After the call, Lake told the hall-filling crowd they were at “a real political rally,” not something put together by unpopular Katie Hobbs, who probably was curled up on her couch knowing that “she’s a fraud.”
Arizona Republicans had “exceptional candidates” for the 2022 elections, Lake said, while Democrats ran “some of the very worst candidates in the history of America . . . brain-dead candidates. . . . They didn’t give a hoot about candidate quality.”
Democrats “rely on election fraud,” Lake said. “Let me repeat that, election fraud…The fix was in. We had the American people on our side….
“In 2020 they stole the election” in the middle of the night, she said, “so they could put a dementia patient like Joe Biden in the White House.”
Lake asked members of the audience in Scottsdale to wave their hands who experienced 2022 election fraud. Almost everyone raised their hands.
Criticizing the skewed election results, Lake repeatedly named the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, and County Recorder Stephen Richer, while she repeatedly had a photograph of them together displayed to the audience.
She referred to Gates’ and Richer’s “stolen election” here in 2022. “If they had one shred of decency, they would resign. They don’t give a damn about your vote . . . They will do anything to stop you and me.”
There’s so much evidence about the fraud, “I could slap the media in the face with it,” Lake said. “. . . They wouldn’t recognize evidence if it fell on their heads.”
She said there were 300,000 ballots “with zero chain of custody,” and a minimum of 140,000 mail-in ballots that were counted that were invalid.
“These people are crooks,” Lake said. “These people are stealing our government.”
Naming Richer and Gates again, she said, “They couldn’t manufacture enough phony votes to sabotage we the people,” so they had to create “mayhem” on Election Day.
“As we prove in our court case, they intentionally printed the wrong image” so that vote-tabulation machines “would jam all day long,” Lake said, although Richer and Gates lied and said the problem was fixed quickly.
Lake is appealing a Maricopa County Superior Court judge’s decision on Christmas Eve to dismiss her two counts that he consented to hear in a limited two-day trial after he refused to take up eight other counts.
Both Gates and Richer are “moderate” Republicans on the record as opposing MAGA candidates during their current terms in office, even while being entrusted to oversee counting the Maricopa County votes.
People spilled out the door of the large hall at the Scottsdale resort. Lake later told a television interviewer that evening that as she arrived to give her talk, she saw people walking a half-mile from their parked cars to attend.
An Arizona state senator, Wendy Rogers, told the same television interviewer, Ben Bergquam, of Real America’s Voice News, “We’re at four times capacity here.” Bergquam said a thousand people were there despite a Super Bowl playoff game the same night.
The previous day, January 28, Lake received a standing ovation at the annual meeting of Republican state committeemen in a large full hall at Phoenix’s Dream City Church. The committeemen strongly elected longtime Trump supporter Jeff DeWit as the new GOP state chairman.
DeWit, in turn, took the stage before Lake gave her January 29 talk to tell the audience, “You have a good fighter in Kari Lake.” He warned that Arizona “is ground zero right now for the left’s takeover” that has to be opposed.
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on January 30, “DeWit has very broad backing and everyone is ready for a professionally run party that is focused on winning general elections and growing the party.”
Querard said he didn’t have an exact attendance count for the GOP committeemen’s meeting, “but present in person or by proxy should be around 1,650 or so.”
Report The Truth
The November general election “needs to be thrown out and redone,” Lake told the Scottsdale audience. “We want a new election . . . We the people cannot take this level of fraud much longer….It is about us and it is about our children. . . .
“They pulled out every single stop to try to stop us,” Lake continued, citing Richer and Gates for “running a super PAC against me.”
That would be “The Pro-Democracy Republicans.”
Blasting Katie Hobbs, the Democrat gubernatorial candidate, Lake called her “a squatter in the governor’s office. Don’t get too comfortable, sweetie…You know you’re a fraud. . . . She’s hiding up in her office” and fears going out to hear public sentiment.
“There is so much riding on this moment,” said Lake, who spoke for nearly an hour. “We cannot surrender and we will not surrender.”
She said that Brown, the Western Journal founder, told her that every time an Arizona election article is posted there, it goes to the top as most-read.
Although Lake openly criticized the media on their platform at the back of the hall — with numerous news cameras there — she said, “Pray that God gives them the courage” to report the truth. Lake said she hopes “they can find it in their heart to do the right thing.”
Lake said she had been busy working with her attorneys Kurt Olsen and Bryan Blehm on her challenge to the election results, adding, “Those guys have a steel spine and they’re not afraid of anything.”
She said that when she was in Tennessee recently, people told her, “‘Kari, stay in this fight’. . . America, I will never give up. . . I’m fighting today, I’m fighting even harder tomorrow. . . . I am not backing down one damn inch. . . . Our resolve to save this republic has never been stronger. . . .
“I want these fraudsters to know we will not be retreating…. I’m in this fight until the victorious end…Oh my gosh, I love you guys…America needs some tough Arizonans” now, Lake said. “. . . They counted on us to give up. We’re not giving up.”
Lake said that Democratic President John F. Kennedy — who was assassinated in 1963 — had said not to pray to have easy lives, but to be strong men.
After her talk, she told Real America’s Voice News that she actually won the gubernatorial race “by a landslide” and cited other instances of vote fraud, such as Biden’s claim to have received 81 million votes for president, and Brazil’s conservative President Jair Bolsonaro supposedly losing his re-election runoff last October.
Lamenting the results of open-border policies, Lake said, “Sadly, the cartels run Arizona now.”
The Real America’s Voice News commentator walked over to some people standing nearby to ask who they were. They turned out to be a mother, father, and their three young children who had come back to the U.S. from Australia in hopes of freedom.
See a story elsewhere in this issue of The Wanderer about Arizona Senate hearings that took testimony about election-law violations here.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress