Kari Lake Responds to Defamation Lawsuit Filed by Top Arizona Elections Official

Republican candidate Kari Lake was the target of a defamation lawsuit filed by a senior election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, on Thursday. Kari Lake replied by accusing the official of attempting to silence her.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer claimed he’s faced “violent vitriol and other dire consequences” because of allegations made by Lake about the 2022 midterm elections. Following the election, Lake has filed several lawsuits with various Arizona state courts to claim that irregularities and errors that occurred during the midterms should make her the winner.

“Rather than accept political defeat, rather than get a new job, she has sought to undermine confidence in our elections and has mobilized millions of her followers against me,” Richer wrote in an op-ed published in The Arizona Republic.

Lake has claimed that Richer and other Maricopa County officials meddled in the election to prevent her from defeating Democrat Katie Hobbs, who was inaugurated in as governor in January, in the campaign for governor after multiple cases were dismissed. In the meanwhile, Lake is publicly mulling a bid for the U.S. Senate and is allegedly a top possibility to serve as Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election.

Lake, her campaign, and her political fundraising organization are named as defendants in Richer’s case, which was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court. Richer is requesting a court ruling deeming Lake’s claims fake and ordering her to remove them from social media in addition to undisclosed monetary penalties.

Two of Lake’s claims are contested in his complaint, including the claim that Richer purposefully printed 19-inch ballot pictures on 20-inch paper, creating issues with counting on election day. He further said in the complaint that he deliberately threw 300,000 fictitious votes into the voting process.

In the lawsuit, Lake’s claims were supported by screenshots and links to videos and social media posts.

“Lake Campaign’s false and defamatory statements accused Richer, of among other things, intentionally sabotaging the 2022 election by intentionally having ballot-on-demand printers print the wrong sized ballots,” he wrote in the suit, adding that her statements also “damaged Richer.”

Although Lake had the First Amendment right to criticize him, his attorneys contend that she made false claims that may have been defamatory. “She has gone far outside of the bounds of protected free speech as guaranteed under the First Amendment and the Arizona Constitution,” Richer claimed in The Republic opinion article.

Her Response

Lake responded by writing on her Twitter page that Richer’s lawsuit is an effort to silence her. Lake has previously promised to take her election disputes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

“I’m exposing the massive corruption in our elections and this … is suing me,” Lake wrote on Twitter Thursday. “He wants to silence US … corrupt elections have saddled us with disasters like [Joe] Biden and Hobbs.”

Officials who allegedly “orchestrated the wide-spread fraud want us to shut-up and accept it,” she wrote, adding a link to a donation webste. “We won’t. Our country is GONE unless we tackle this problem. They want to stop President Trump. They want to stop me. They want to stop you. Not. Going. To. Happen.”

One of Lake’s legal claims is that on Election Day on November 8, thousands of Republican voters were denied the right to vote due to vote-tabulation system malfunctions at dozens of polling places in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county. She also said that the county’s signature-verification procedure for mail-in votes was allegedly flawed.

The Arizona Supreme Court dismissed Lake’s complaint against Maricopa, Richer, and other state election officials last month, finding that the GOP candidate had not provided sufficient proof of widespread voting fraud. Peter Thompson, a Maricopa County judge, rendered a decision in May that rejected Maricopa County officials’ request for sanctions against Lake and her counsel.

“Even if her argument did not prevail, Lake, through her witness, presented facts consistent with and in support of her legal argument,” Thompson wrote at the time. “The remainder of Defendants’ allegations appear to rely on the Court’s inherent power as the authority by which they request the Court ‘award’ unspecified sanctions ‘against’ Lake’s counsel,” he also said.

The judge said he “acknowledges its inherent authority to sanction bad faith attorney conduct and that the rules of attorney conduct in the Rules of the Supreme Court provide a legal basis for imposing sanctions against attorneys,” according to the ruling However, he stipulated that “opposing litigants in a heated dispute will naturally view the same evidence differently.”

On May 26, a couple of days after County Attorney Rachel Mitchell submitted a motion for sanctions the previous week, Thompson ultimately rejected the request for punishment and the plea for restitution. It happened roughly a day after Thompson decided Lake had not provided sufficient evidence to support her contention that county authorities had not verified tens of thousands of signatures on mail-in votes.