Smile. You’re on Kari Camera!
So I guess the next Arizona GOP chairperson will be someone who had the sense to stay far the fuck away from Kari Lake?
Arizona Republican Party Chairman Jeff DeWit resigned Wednesday after he could be heard in a leaked recording offering a job and asking U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake to name a price that would keep her out of politics.
DeWit’s departure shakes up the Republican Party in a battleground state that will feature prominently in the battle for control of the White House and the U.S. Senate in the November election.
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“There are very powerful people that want to keep you out,” DeWit tells Lake in what he described as a “selectively edited” recording. “But they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is in a big way.”
He did not say who asked him to approach Lake but said they were “back East.” He asks her repeatedly not to tell anyone about the conversation.
“Is there a number at which—” DeWit asks at one point, before Lake interjects: “I can be bought?”
In a statement announcing his resignation, DeWit said he had planned to fight to keep his job until Lake’s team gave him an ultimatum to resign or she would release another, more damaging recording.
Turns out there was no Whitey Tape, but there are several DeWit tapes.
“I am truly unsure of its contents, but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk,” DeWit said.
OK, that doesn’t sound incriminating at all.
He said he didn’t intend to bribe Lake but was offering candid advice for her to sit out the Senate race and run again for governor in 2026. He was employing Lake at his private company at the time, he said, and they’d had “many conversations where I was looking out for her financial interests.”
“Our relationship was based on friendship, and the conversation that is now being scrutinized was an open, unguarded exchange between friends in the living room of her house,” DeWit said. “I genuinely believed I was offering a helpful perspective to someone I considered a friend.”
Next time a friend asks you to talk into their lamp, say no.
Apparently it is widely known that Lake is wired for sound and her husband (edit: takes videos of her interactions with other people) which makes DeWit pretty DeWitless to talk to her at all. Maybe he can hop back on the tRump campaign train.
DeWit went down swinging, blasting Lake’s “disturbing tendency to to exploit private interactions for personal gain,” which he said is concerning given the amount of time Lake spends with Trump.
“I question how effective a United States Senator can be when they cannot be trusted to engage in private and confidential conversations,” DeWit said.
DeWit was chief operating officer for Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns and chief financial officer at NASA during the Trump presidency. He was seen as a trusted and experienced operative who could bridge the bitter divide between Trump loyalists and old guard Republicans in Arizona, many of whom were brought into the party by the late Sen. John McCain.
It’s so sad when friends fall out. Especially when those friends are Republicans and the falling out doesn’t result in extremely painful and fatal injuries. But where there’s an organization full of vain, greedy people who hate everyone and worship guns and violence there’s hope.