One of the great things about Laurie Roberts’ columns in The Arizona Republic is that she has a knack for summarizing multifaceted political stories in a straightforward ways. Consider the lede, for example, in Roberts’ latest piece.
The Arizona Republican Party on Saturday sent a flat out, full-throated, flabbergasting message to the voters of this great state. We be crazy, they proclaimed. Party officials, during their state convention, elected none other than indicted Sen. Jake Hoffman and expelled Rep. Liz Harris to represent Arizona on the Republican National Committee.
For those outside of Arizona, Hoffman and Harris are probably unfamiliar figures, though there are plenty of reasons the Arizona GOP sent a “we be crazy” message with its latest selections for the Republican National Committee.
Harris, for example, is a former state legislator who, as NBC News reported, “was expelled from the Legislature a year ago after she invited an election denier to provide testimony laced with unsubstantiated allegations at a televised legislative hearing on elections.”
It’s likely that Republican officials in Arizona chose Harris for the RNC role, not despite this record, but because of it.
Hoffman, meanwhile, is an even more amazing case. In fact, regular Rachel Maddow Show viewers might remember his face, even if they don’t remember his name.
In January 2022, about a year after Hoffman served as a fake elector in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, an Arizona Republic reporter caught up with the GOP state senator and asked him how we came to participate in the allegedly illegal partisan scheme. The brief interview did not go well for the lawmaker.
NEW: January 5 letter from Arizona fake elector to Mike Pence asks Pence to delay certifying the election and consult Arizona legislature on considering fake Trump electors instead. pic.twitter.com/kKr1WEOBXc
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 16, 2022
This, of course, was the same Hoffman who, on Jan. 5, 2021, sent a letter urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay the counting of Arizona’s electors and to “seek clarification from the Arizona legislature as to which slate of electors were proper and accurate.” (Earlier, Hoffman was also allegedly involved in a scheme to pay teenagers to create bogus social-media accounts pushing messages intended to undermine public confidence in the elections.)









