Opinion: What is it that Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward doesn’t want us to know about her part in what increasingly appears to be a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election?
By Laurie Roberts | Arizona Republic
Kelli Ward, Arizona Republican Party chair, is fighting a subpoena from the House committee investigating the events leading to Jan. 6, 2020.
Arizona Republican Party Kelli Ward is fighting a subpoena aimed at getting to the bottom of what increasingly appears to be a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election so that Donald Trump could serve a second term.
Ward and her husband Michael list all manner of reasons why the House committee looking into the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol has no business looking at their phone records.
It is, they claim, an invasion of their medical patients’ privacy. A violation of their First Amendment rights. An unconstitutional opportunity for Democrats to get “the personal telephone numbers, IP addresses, file names of attachments, and contact details of the party members most in communication with the state chair of the party at a time when the legitimacy of the last presidential election was in dispute.”
“As such,” the Wards’ lawsuit contends, “the Subpoena provides the Committee with the means to chill the First Amendment associational rights not just of the Plaintiffs but of the entire Republican Party in Arizona.”
That’s something she and her fellow Republicans might have wanted to think about before they tried to steal an election.
It was a masterful plan to thwart the election
Really, it was a masterful plan.
The Wards, Senate candidate Jim Lamon and eight other Trump supporters – people who would have been empowered to cast Arizona’s electoral votes had their candidate won – were to meet on Dec. 14, 2020, the same day the state’s actual electors were meeting. They would sign and send to Congress a document avowing that they had been duly elected by Arizona voters to cast the state’s 11 electoral votes for Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, 29 Republican state legislators – including several just elected but not yet seated – would sign a three-page “Joint Resolution of the 54th Legislature” asking Congress to accept the 11 “alternate” electoral votes for Trump or “to have all electoral votes nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
The document, dated Dec. 14 and written on letterhead with the official state seal, was circulated by Sen. Kelly Townsend, now a candidate for Congress and addressed to Vice President Mike Pence.
