Leaked call shows clash between Lake campaign, county
Hours before Kari Lake was projected to lose her race for Arizona governor, attorneys for her campaign and for the Republican National Committee spoke by phone Monday to a lawyer for Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters.
The Lake representatives posed a series of questions about voting problems on Election Day, nearly a week earlier.
Then, toward the end of the phone call, an attorney for the RNC stressed the importance of rapid answers, according to the county attorney, Tom Liddy, a lifelong Republican who heads the office for civil litigation.
Liddy recalled that the RNC attorney, whom he and others identified as Benjamin Mehr, told him that there were “a lot of irate people out there” and that the campaign “can’t control them.”
Liddy said Friday that he considered those words a threat.
On Friday night, a Twitter account associated with Lake’s campaign posted a video of a portion of the call that captures Liddy cursing and raising his voice. The Lake campaign did not respond to a request for the full video, which was taken from inside the GOP’s war room at a Scottsdale resort. County officials said they were blindsided that the conversation had been recorded and then posted publicly with the names of only one side bleeped out.
Tim La Sota, an attorney for the Lake campaign who was present for the call, did not dispute Liddy’s characterization of the conversation but said he did not interpret Mehr’s comments as a threat. Mehr did not respond to a text message seeking comment. An RNC spokesman called Liddy’s account of the call “false” and issued a statement attacking Maricopa County officials as “completely inept.”
The tense exchange, between two Republican lawyers, lays bare the internal GOP war over the administration of elections. Nowhere is that feud more ferocious than in Maricopa County, the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country, which became a focal point of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 loss.
Vote-counting is still proceeding in the county, and the race for state attorney general, which could shape enforcement of election law, hangs in the balance.
The back-and-forth captured on video illustrates how intensifying distrust broke into open hostility in the aftermath of the midterm elections. Lake’s campaign has cited problems with printers that plagued voting across Maricopa County to argue that the results should not be certified and that county officials should be thrown out of their jobs.
Lake has not conceded to Democrat Katie Hobbs, who declared victory shortly after major networks called the race Monday.
The exasperation evident on the call has continued to define Lake’s public comments in the
days since, while her campaign’s legal strategy remains unclear. People close to her campaign say potential litigation would be aimed not at reversing the results but at narrowing the margin.
Lake has not called for protests, as Trump did following his loss, but her team has shared memes about Hobbs portraying the Democrat as a dog and calling her “unfit” and “downright shady.”
The video clip circulated by the Lake campaign shows the RNC attorney, seated before a computer, holding a phone in his hand, with another person on the other side of him also holding up a phone as if to record the episode. In the clip, the RNC attorney says it would be helpful “for us to be able to say that Tom Liddy is giving us good information.”
“Guess what? Let me educate you,” Liddy replied, according to the video recording. “I cannot control what you say. OK? You can say whatever you want to say. I can’t control that. Now, if you’re not happy working with me ... then we’ll just stop. I don’t give a s---.”
At one point, Liddy said: “It sounds like you’re threatening me.” Mehr responded: “I’m definitely not threatening you, and I promise that.”
Liddy repeated the RNC attorney’s words back to him, as he recalled them. “If I don’t get these answers to you quickly, you’re not going to be able to tell the crazy people that I’ve been helpful,” Liddy said, according to the video recording. “I don’t give a f---.”
“I’m just saying what I’m worried about,” Mehr responded, to which Liddy told him, “I don’t care.”
Liddy’s call log shows the conversation lasted 12 minutes.
He said the brief video lacks crucial context explaining his reaction to Mehr’s remarks — namely the alleged invocation of angry members of the public.
La Sota, the Lake campaign attorney, told said call was one of many conducted with the county about “garden-variety” issues with ballots.
Questions raised early in the call focused on the nature of outstanding ballots and the number of people who failed to properly check out of a voting center after encountering mechanical problems, potentially preventing them from casting a ballot elsewhere.