6 days Ago By [email protected] (Arizona Mirror)
by Caitlin Sievers, Arizona Mirror Kari Lake, one of Arizona’s most fervent election deniers, seems to have accepted her loss in last week’s race for U.S. Senate to U.
S. Congressman Ruben Gallego. At the same time, she’s still dealing with the fallout of her refusal to accept her loss in the 2022 election for Arizona governor.
Nearly two full days after the Associated Press projected that her Democratic opponent had won Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat, Trump-endorsed Republican Lake posted a video on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, signaling that her run for the Senate was at an end.
“I can say for certain that truth will never stop mattering to me,” Lake told her fans. “You will never stop mattering to me. These memories that we’ve made together will never go away — they will grow sweeter over time, and I will never stop fighting for the state I love.
” Though Lake, a former Phoenix television news anchor, said in the video that she was leaving “this fight,” she tiptoed around directly admitting defeat. Marine veteran Gallego’s campaign confirmed to the Arizona Mirror that Lake hasn’t yet contacted him to concede. On Nov.
11, the same day that the Associated Press called the Senate race for Gallego, Lake’s husband filed a motion asking a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to dismiss a defamation case that stemmed from Lake’s refusal to accept the results of the race she lost two years prior. In June 2023, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer filed a defamation suit against Lake, her husband, Jeff Halperin, her gubernatorial campaign and the Save Arizona Fund. The Save Arizona Fund is a dark money nonprofit that Lake controls and that has raised an unknown amount of money to fund her legal efforts to overturn the 2022 election.
In the months leading up to the suit, Lake falsely accused Richer of intentionally sabotaging the 2022 election, and blamed her loss in the gubernatorial race to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs on unproven election fraud. Lake has repeatedly claimed — without evidence — that Richer was responsible for 300,000 “illegal, invalid, phony or bogus” early ballots being counted in Maricopa County.
She’s lost every trial and appeal in her lawsuit challenging the election results over the past two years. In March, Lake defaulted in the case , legally conceding that her claims about Richer were false, even as she continued to say the opposite in public statements. Since then, both sides have struggled to compel the other to turn over evidence that could be used to determine how much Lake owes Richer in damages, the only issue left for the court to decide.
Richer is seeking damages to reimburse him and his wife for the thousands of dollars he said they spent to install new security features in their home after he said Lake’s false statements spurred threats of violence and harassment. Additionally, Richer is asking to be awarded punitive damages, as well as compensation for damage to his reputation and mental health. William Fischbach, an attorney for Halperin, wrote in the Nov.
11 motion that the judge should “end this farcical defamation lawsuit.” He wrote that, because Richer didn’t comply with an order from the court to disclose some sort of quantification of the damages that he believes he’s owed, in addition to other reasons, the case should be dismissed. Fischbach wrote that Richer can’t directly attribute to Lake any harm to his reputation or mental health, since his standing with fellow Republicans had soured long before Lake lost in 2022.
“Right or wrong, fair or unfair, Richer’s decision to clash with Trump predictably ‘provoke[d] hostility’ from Trump supporters,” Fischbach wrote. “Unsurprisingly, this had a pernicious effect on Richer’s reputation and standing with Trump supporters.” Fischbach pointed out that Richer had been the target of hate and online disparagement prior to Lake’s accusations of election fraud, starting after he defended the county’s election practices amidst widespread claims of fraud based on the “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
While it’s true that Richer was harassed and threatened before Lake began targeting him specifically, since she lost the 2022 election, Lake has regularly mentioned Richer in social media posts, on podcasts and television shows where she alleged that the governorship was stolen from her. Lake has more than 2 million followers on X. Both Fischbach and attorneys representing Richer declined to comment for this article.
Matthew Kelly, a Phoenix lawyer with Ballard Spahr, who frequently defends defamation lawsuits but was not involved in this case, told the Arizona Mirror that it was always difficult to tell how a judge will rule in such cases, but that it would likely hinge on Richer’s response to the motion, which has not yet been filed. “Dismissals on the basis of discovery violations are relatively rare, but they do happen,” Kelly said. (Editor’s note: Ballard Spahr represents the Arizona Mirror and its publisher, States Newsroom, on First Amendment issues, and Kelly has worked on some of those cases.
) Additionally, Fischbach claimed that the case should be dismissed because Richer failed to inform the defendants about the county’s “data mining” operation “that monitors news stories and social media in real time to gauge the public’s sentiment towards Richer.” For her part, Lake has also been slow to provide evidence or refused to disclose it, most recently saying that any emails about media coverage of Lake’s false statements had been “purged” when her gubernatorial campaign, Kari Lake for Arizona, was dissolved. During an Oct.
21 hearing, Lake’s attorney, Tyler Swensen, said that the emails were deleted before the defamation suit was filed, clearing Lake of any obligation to retain them as evidence. But while Swensen told the court that the emails were likely lost when Kari Lake for Arizona was dissolved nearly a year before the case was filed, that is not true. The campaign filed its last finance report in early 2024, and was spending money through Dec.
31, 2023, more than six months after Richer filed the suit. Fischbach’s third and final reason for dismissal was that Richer permanently deleted his X account on Nov. 7, illegally destroying evidence in the case.
Richer deactivated his account Nov. 7, two days after the Nov. 5 election, as the site was awash in misinformation and baseless accusations of election fraud in Maricopa County.
Richer reactivated his account earlier this week, after Halperin filed the motion to dismiss the case. Lake and the other defendants in the suit had clashed with Richer over who was responsible for determining which tweets were pertinent to the case, downloading them and providing them to the other side. Fischbach claimed that Lake’s decision to default and not to defend herself in the case was strategic.
“Defendants defaulted intentionally to smoke out Richer’s inability to prove any damages,” he wrote. The motion to dismiss contains information and claims some of which are tangentially related to the defamation case, at best. In the motion, Fischbach casts doubt on Richer’s statement in a 2021 letter to Republicans that he “didn’t want to be in the spotlight” with a footnote about Richer’s participation as a youth in musical productions such as “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Cats.
” “I think it’s obvious that defense lawyers feel very strongly about their position and have put it forth in a vehement manner,” Kelly told the Mirror. Fischbach also mentioned his own previous service in the U.S.
Army, monitoring parliamentary elections in Iraq in 2005, adding that his job wasn’t to pick winners but to “protect the process.” Halperin asked the court not only to dismiss the suit, but to sanction Richer for failing to comply with court orders. “To protect democracy is to preserve the right of others to vote for candidates you don’t like,” Fischbach wrote.
“Kari Lake is hated by some voters; loved by others. This lawsuit was met with accolades by those in the former group. But it has cast doubt on the fairness and legitimacy of the democratic process in the hearts and minds of the latter.
For Richer, the harshest of sanctions is not merely justified. It is imperative.” Lake has a Nov.
22 deadline to disclose to the court when her campaign emails were “purged” and at whose direction. A pretrial conference is set for February 2025, ahead of a jury trial to determine what damages Richer is owed. Campaign Action.
