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On Tuesday, Kari Lake essentially admitted defeat in the latest stage of her crusade against a Maricopa County election official whom she falsely accused of cheating her out of a gubernatorial election victory in 2022.
Lake announced she won't contest a claim that she defamed Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican, after spending the better part of the past two years spreading conspiracy theories about him. Richer filed a defamation lawsuit last year alleging that Lake and her allies drastically altered his life and forced him to hire security after they spread lies about him online and at various events.
As NBC News reported:
Lake’s legal team on Tuesday filed a default judgment motion that indicated she was not challenging her culpability. She instead seeks to dispute the damages. She also said Richer should have to turn over relevant medical and psychiatric records to show that his health was negatively affected, as he detailed in his lawsuit. Lake requested a jury for the default judgment hearing. Lake, a staunch Trump ally, has repeatedly pushed the lie that she won her 2022 bid for governor, and in doing so she took aim at Richer.
This amounts to a pretty pitiful retreat on Lake’s part. But as you might imagine, she’s not framing things that way. Instead, she’s leaning into victimhood and portraying her decision not to challenge the defamation claims as tactful politicking.
In a video posted on social media Tuesday night, she called the lawsuit “ludicrous” and said it was part of an effort by “political elites” to empty out her coffers. “Since they can’t blackmail or bribe me, they’ve resorted to filing a punishing lawsuit to try to stop me,” she said. She claimed, without even a hint of self-awareness, that she and putative Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are being subjected to “lawfare” — conservatives’ favorite buzzword these days — designed to “punish, impoverish, and destroy” political opponents through the legal system. She ended by saying that she "won't be taking part" in the suit.
The lawfare claim is particularly rich coming from someone who’s waged several conspiratorial election lawsuits — all of which have been thrown out — accusing her perceived political opponents of electoral corruption in the 2022 race. The only person in this scenario who’s actually engaged in lawfare is Lake, which is why judges have sanctioned her lawyers for lobbing the baseless legal claims in the first place. Her legal retreat does highlight an inconvenient truth for Team Lake, though: some of the most damning criticism of her has come from members of her own party. That doesn't bode well for her electoral chances this fall.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors — which is controlled by Republicans and led by Republican chairman Bill Gates — has condemned her election denialism, too. Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain, has made clear that she has no intentions of supporting Lake after the candidate lobbed cruel attacks on her father. And Lake’s allegation about “bribes” she’s received appears to be a reference to a recorded call with former Arizona GOP Chair Jeff DeWit in which he tried to convince her to drop out of the Senate race.
Unlike Lake, I don’t think any of this stuff indicates there’s some deep-seated conspiracy to keep her out of power. It just underscores how she's just spent years terrorizing fellow Republicans, and now those chickens are coming home to roost in the middle of election season.
Perhaps warring with members of her own party wasn't so smart, after all. Who could have imagined?