It seemed the perfect time to topple the Arizona Republican Party chairman. Donald Trump, fresh off his decisive New Hampshire primary win, is heading to the Grand Canyon State Friday to headline a fundraiser for the state party. The next day, the state party will hold its annual meeting where voting party officials can reelect – or replace – the chair.
Kari Lake, an ardent Trump ally running in a closely watched Senate campaign, waited nearly 10 months to reveal that Jeff DeWit was the Republican official who sat in her living room early last year and seemingly attempted to bribe her into not running for the Senate.
DeWit resigned Wednesday in a detailed letter posted to X.com, the platform formerly called Twitter, accusing Lake of violating their friendship and trying to blackmail him by threatening to issue another recording of him. His decision to step down came one day after the Daily Mail posted a recording of the private conversation in which the Republican state chair offered her a lucrative job in the private sector if she would stand down and hit pause for two years on any campaign efforts.
At the time of the conversation early last year, Republicans in Washington were still smarting from a disappointing showing in the midterms and were talking openly about plans to seek Republican candidates who would be more viable in general elections.
In a presentation on the social media platform Rumble Wednesday night, the brash former television personality sidestepped a question about why it took her so long to name DeWit. Last March, during a speech before a crowded hall at the Conservative Political Action Committee, Lake expressed outrage about the attempts to get her to stand down.
All she said was that she hadn’t recalled how “bad” the conversation sounded until she happened to listen to the recording again a few days ago. “It was so much worse than what I remembered it being,” she said.
Few Republicans believe the timing was mere happenstance.
“This is what precipitated this – the annual meeting is Saturday,” said Barrett Marson, a longtime Arizona political consultant. “[Republican party members] could elect someone new Saturday. They don’t have to, but they very well could.”
After four years of Kelli Ward’s leadership, DeWit was elected to head the state party. A strong Trump ally, Ward’s time as chair ended in January 2023 after disappointing results in the 2022 midterms, including Lake’s loss in the governor’s race and Blake Masters’ failure to defeat Mark Kelley, Arizona’s Democratic Senator. Several Republican leaders called for Ward to resign in 2021 after she backed Trump’s contention that Democrats had stolen the Arizona election. (A controversial audit of the Maricopa County’s results affirmed Joe Biden’s win.)
The state party nearly went broke as GOP donors shied away from investing in campaigns. Fundraising this cycle has improved, with the party last month announcing a “record-breaking” final quarter of 2023, amassing $670,000.
Marson described DeWit as a consensus candidate who struggled to bridge the divide between Trump allies and establishment Republicans. “He was too MAGA for the establishment and too establishment for the MAGA crowd, so Kari Lake decided to take him out,” he explained.
Others cast the deliberate leaking of the conversation as a pyrrhic victory for Lake, arguing that no Republican, including her own staff, will trust her with a private conversation again.
“What does she want – complete and total control of the state party? Okay, but what does that get you, and at what cost, because Jeff was an ally?” asked one GOP operative. “Does anyone trust that they can have a conversation with Kari, and it won’t be broadcast or weaponized against you at a later date?”
Already, names for potential DeWit replacements are circulating, including J.D. Hayworth, who lost his House seat to a Democrat in 2006 and who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. John McCain in the 2010 GOP primary. Another name being mentioned is Liz Harris, a former state lawmaker who was expelled from the Arizona House of Representatives last year for ethics violations stemming from wild and unsupported accusations she leveled at elected public officials, including taking bribes from Mexican cartels.
Jim O’Connor, who chairs Arizona’s Corporate Commission, also has expressed interest, sources familiar with internal state GOP politics told RealClearPolitics. O’Connor is a strong Trump backer who supported the former president’s charges that the 2020 election was rigged and has pushed for a return to traditional in-person voting. The Corporation Commission regulates electric, water, and gas utilities and has oversight of securities investing, pipeline safety, and railroad crossings. Although elections are not part of its oversight duties, O’Connor unsuccessfully tried to persuade other leaders at the agency to investigate election issues because it has the authority to revoke corporate charters of businesses that don’t comply with state law.
Like Trump, Lake is a former television personality who knows how to drive a news cycle. In 2022, she built a Republican campaign for governor around claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, winning the former president’s endorsement and several of his top “America First” allies.
She lost that highly contested race by 17,000 votes to Democrat Katie Hobbs. But even before the GOP primary ended, Lake had adopted some of Trump’s most notorious traits, airing grievances and fighting grudge matches on Twitter while regularly demeaning reporters for asking questions she didn’t want to answer.
In one notable episode during the GOP primary, Lake erupted at Fox News anchor Bret Baier for questioning her about accusations by a local drag queen that Lake previously attended his shows and even hosted one in her home. Lake, who at the time was making public drag-queen performances a campaign issue, denied the part about hosting a show in her home and threatened to sue the drag queen for defamation, though she never followed up on it.
“I’m appalled that you would bring that up when you have not talked about our stolen election,” she scolded Baier. After the dust-up, she quickly posted the interview on Twitter, casting it in a positive light: “WATCH what happens when a Mama Bear takes down a Fake News Baier,” she wrote.
In another post, she quote-tweeted a cartoonish video of her snuffing out Baier, his body quickly incinerating into dust. As the simulated annihilation takes place, Lake is seen sporting a sideways red MAGA hat, sunglasses, and gold chains while smoking what appears to be a joint.
After Lake lost the general election, she followed Trump’s example, filing suit to allege that the election was rigged and claiming that problems with ballot printers at some polling places on Election Day were the result of intentional misconduct. A month later, a Phoenix judge, appointed by a Republican governor, tossed out Lake’s case. Her loss to Hobbs was one of the reasons DeWit cited for Lake to step aside during the leaked conversation.
“I’ll say this,” DeWit explained. “I’ve never seen anyone – I can’t think of a single person who’s lost and then ran and won.”
During that surreptitiously taped conversation, DeWit told Lake that some power forces “back East” wanted her to sit the election cycle out and had told Lake to name her price if she agreed to stand down. “There are very powerful people who want to keep you out, and what they’re willing to do is put their money where their mouth is in a big way,” DeWit told Lake.
“Is there a number at which …” DeWit asked before Lake interrupted him.
“I can be bought?” she asked. Lake is heard on the tape taking offense, calling such an arrangement “unethical” and “absolutely immoral.”
“I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror,” she said. “I’m running, and I’m going to be the biggest pain in their f---g ass, They’re going to have to f---g kill me to stop me.”
After DeWit resigned, Lake told her livestream Rumble listeners that she didn’t know who was behind DeWit’s offer, but that Washington is so full of corruption that she could think of “400 to 500 people behind this.”
Lake started the call by showing her speech at CPAC last year and then airing the recording of the conversation with DeWit that led to his resignation. She then criticized DeWit for waiting 24 hours to resign and failing to apologize to the people of Arizona, noting that it “came very late.”
“He tried to act like the behavior on that audio is normal communication amongst friends,” she said. “He should have apologized and said he would work to do better.”
In his resignation statement, DeWit pointed out that at the time of the recording, Lake was his employee at Superfeed Technologies, a company that creates apps to promote political campaigns. Lake disputed that DeWit was her boss, claiming that he was “an employee, a co-worker just like me.” This is wrong, according to her own personal financial disclosure reports, which list DeWit as the CEO of Superfeed, while Lake served as a communications advisor to the firm.
DeWitt said Wednesday that his initial inclination was to fight to retain his job, but that Lake’s threat to release another, more damaging tape persuaded him to step aside.
“I am truly unsure of its contents, but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk,” he stated. Instead of offering her a “bribe,” DeWit said, he believed he was trying to offer her some candid advice to take a break and then possibly take another stab at a run for governor in 2028.
This isn’t the first time Lake has weaponized a recording. She regularly wears a small microphone while traveling around Arizona to public appearances while her husband, a former news photographer, records her interactions with people – strong backers, opponents, and reporters. She posts videos of some of those clashes on social media. (Arizona is a one-party consent state, meaning a person who is part of the conversation can legally record it without the other party’s consent.)
Last autumn, Lake and her Democratic opponent in the Senate race, Rep. Ruben Gallego, were trading jabs on Twitter while on the same flight from Washington, D.C., to Phoenix.
Lake didn’t let the opportunity go without turning it into the campaign’s first demonstration of her trademark performative politics. A local television station called it “the first public debate” of Arizona’s Senate campaign. The confrontation took place just days after Lake filed to run for the Senate seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema. Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in 2022 to become an independent, has yet to say whether she will run for reelection.
Still in mid-air, Lake blasted Gallego on Twitter, accusing him of “facilitating an invasion” at the border.
“Hey @KariLake we’re on the same plane! Just come back from first class to coach, and we can chat,” he responded. “Happy to walk you through all my legislative work to deliver key resources to AZ’s border communities.”
But Lake wasn’t finished. Once the plane landed and the two were in the terminal, a mic’ed-up Lake approached him outside a men’s restroom with questions while a camera was running.
Gallego repeatedly told Lake that immigration and the border were issues they could both work together on, but Lake simply dismissed all talk of compromise. “No, I’m not working together with you – I’m going to beat you,” she told him.
Gallego is running unopposed in his primary, while Lake faces County Sheriff Mark Lamb in the GOP primary.
Other than Lake’s efforts to keep herself in the news, the other wild card in the race is Sinema, the incumbent senator who won office as a Democrat, but who has since become an independent. Her plans are still a mystery, and she has until April 6 to declare her candidacy, though she must collect more than 40,000 signatures to win a place on the ballot.
Sinema raised $4.6 million in the first nine months of 2023, less than half of Gallego’s nearly $10 million haul. Sinema still has more than twice as much in the bank – $10.8 million – though her fundraising has slowed since leaving the Democratic Party.
The release of the fourth quarter fundraising data at the end of this month will provide more clues about Sinema’s plans and Lake’s strength. Lake took in $2.1 million in her first quarter in the race, a figure that ranks second nationally for Republican Senate challengers.
Marson predicted Sinema would soon jump in, highlighting her record of forcing changes to the Democrats’ massive infrastructure bill and appealing to moderates in both parties and independents – those who view Lake and Gallego as the two extremes of the ideological spectrum.
“Sinema is going to talk about the [infrastructure] pork she brought home and the big things she’s done for Arizona,” Marson predicted. “Once she starts spending the $10 million, I think this is going to be a different race.”
Lake didn’t miss an opportunity to rack up some last-minute funds during her Rumble livestream Wednesday night, several times asking listeners to donate to her campaign and purchase her book in between jabs at reporters, including one she repeatedly described as a “cat lady.”
“If you can make a donation – if it’s $1, if it’s $10, if it’s 100 or $1,000, it’s appreciated –anything you can do – we have to support these candidates who are standing up against corruption and for the people that want to save our country,” she told listeners.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' national political correspondent.
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