Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake answers questions during a Clean Election Commission debate against Democratic candidate Rep. Ruben Gallego. Photo by Joe Rondone | The Arizona Republic/Pool
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake has claimed that all of the emails that might contain evidence pertinent to a defamation suit filed against her have been wiped, so she can’t share them to be used as evidence.
During an Oct. 21 hearing, Tyler Swensen, one of Lake’s attorneys, told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner that the campaign associated with the email accounts that might contain evidence was dissolved almost a year before Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer filed his defamation lawsuit.
If that were true, Lake would have had no obligation to preserve emails in the accounts as evidence.
However, Kari Lake for Arizona filed its last campaign finance report in January 2024, and the campaign was spending money through Dec. 31, 2023, more than six months after Richer filed the lawsuit.
Swensen did not respond to the Arizona Mirror’s request to answer questions about the claims he made in court.
Lake, a former Phoenix television news anchor who pivoted to politics as a Donald Trump acolyte, spent months falsely accusing Richer of intentionally sabotaging the 2022 election, and blamed her loss in the gubernatorial race to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs on unproven election fraud.
Lake has repeatedly claimed — without a shred of evidence — that Richer was responsible for 300,000 “illegal, invalid, phony or bogus” early ballots being counted in Maricopa County. She’s lost every trial and appeal in her lawsuit challenging the election results over the past two years.
In June 2023, Richer filed a defamation suit against Lake, her husband, her gubernatorial campaign and the Save Arizona Fund.
The Save Arizona Fund is a dark money nonprofit that Lake controls and that has raised an unknown amount of money to fund her legal efforts to overturn the 2022 election.
Richer is seeking damages to reimburse him and his wife for the thousands of dollars he said they spent to install new security features in their home after he said Lake’s false statements spurred threats of violence and harassment.
Additionally, Richer is asking to be awarded punitive damages as well as compensation for damage to his reputation and mental health.
Even though Lake has since publicly professed that her statements about Richer were true, in March she accepted a default judgment, meaning that she legally conceded to the court that the statements were false. She later said she only defaulted because she didn’t want to participate in a “witch hunt” and accused Richer of using the lawsuit to distract her from her run for the Senate.
Lake officially announced her run for Senate in October 2023, more than three months after the defamation suit was filed.
Following the default judgment, the only thing left for the court to decide is damages. But Richer and his attorneys have struggled for months to compel Lake to turn over documents and communications to be used as evidence in a jury trial to determine how much he is owed.
In August, Warner ordered Lake and her husband, Jeff Halperin, to provide several categories of documents after Lake refused to hand them over and made what the judge called “unwarranted objections” to his orders.
The kinds of documents that he ordered Lake to produce included any analysis that her or her team made of media reports about the defamatory social media posts she made about Richer, and communications with or between Lake’s campaign — named Kari Lake for Arizona — or workers for the Save Arizona Fund about the social media posts.
She was also ordered to surrender any analyses made of media coverage of events or podcasts where she made defamatory statements about Richer, as well as any communications or solicitations for donations that Lake sent which included a link to any of Lake’s defamatory comments — and how much money she raised from those communications.
Multiple times during the Oct. 21 hearing, Swensen told the court that all emails from Lake’s gubernatorial campaign were gone, but was fuzzy on the details of exactly when that happened, who “purged” them and why.
“My understanding was there was a restart, and that account is now used strictly and solely for her Senate campaign, and anything associated with the gubernatorial campaign is gone from that account,” Swensen said.
In a previous court filing, Lake’s attorneys wrote that it was her “understanding and belief” that those emails were purged. Warner told Swensen he was more interested in the facts than anyone’s “understanding and belief.”
“‘Understanding and belief’ is something that lawyers often use when they want to hedge,” the judge said. “They don’t want to say it, but they don’t want to not say it.”
Swensen answered that he didn’t know if Lake could explain how and when the “purge” or restart happened.
The email addresses in question all used the domain name @karilake.com, the same domain name Lake uses for her Senate campaign. Lake and members of her staff, including at least two holdovers who handle media and communications, are using the same email addresses for her Senate campaign as they did during her race for governor.
Lake’s gubernatorial campaign, Kari Lake for Arizona, regularly made payments in 2022 and 2023 to Squarespace, a site for building and hosting websites; to GoDaddy, a site that hosts websites and email servers; and to Google.
It’s possible that Lake changed email servers at some point, while keeping the same addresses, and lost access to old emails from her time campaigning for governor, but Kari Lake for Arizona continued to make payments to GoDaddy and Google through the end of 2023, six months after the suit had been filed, according to campaign finance reports.
Her Senate campaign began paying GoDaddy in early October 2023, three months after the suit was filed. That committee, Kari Lake for Senate, has continued to make payments to GoDaddy and Google in 2024.
“(Kari Lake for Arizona) was dissolved as an entity almost a year before this lawsuit was filed, and at that point, that may have been when the emails were purged and everything was taken down,” Swensen said on Oct. 21. “That’s what occurred.”
But Swensen’s claim is demonstrably false. A year before Richer filed the defamation suit was some four months prior to the 2022 election. And far from being officially dissolved directly after the election, Kari Lake for Arizona raised more than $2.5 million between Election Day 2022 and the end of that year.
The campaign went on to spend more than $750,000 over the course of 2023 and filed its last campaign finance report on Jan. 12, 2024, the day it was dissolved, according to a filing with the Arizona Corporation Commission.
In the Oct. 21 hearing, Swensen complained that Richer’s requests for documents to be used as evidence were overly broad, with searches resulting in tens of thousands of pages of documents to parse, even though the judge had already ordered Richer to narrow the scope of his requests.
“It’s just, it’s got to end at some point,” Swensen said.
Lake had already produced some of the requested documents, Richer’s attorney Ralph Mayrell told the court on Oct. 21, but most of them were “not particularly complete or useful.”
A Lake staffer provided a short list of news reports about the defamatory statements, Mayrell said, adding that it appeared that the list was created by pulling from a larger data source and that Lake should just provide that instead.
Lake’s allegations that the 2022 election was stolen from her and that Richer had something to do with it were covered extensively both by local and national news organizations. The Arizona Mirror alone has written more than 50 stories about Lake’s false claims of voter fraud and Maricopa County’s supposed connection to it.
Swensen told the court on Oct. 21 that Richer’s requests for documents in the case were “outrageous.”
“It’s really, in our view, them trying to interfere with Ms. Lake’s senatorial campaign,” Swensen said.
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