Kelli Ward could be a smoking gun on Trump’s criminality

UPDATE (Nov. 14, 2022, 11:58 a.m. ET): The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to block the Jan. 6 committee from accessing Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward’s phone as part of its investigation into pro-Trump efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.  

Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward could ultimately be the skeleton key that unlocks a trove of details about former President Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn Arizona’s 2020 presidential election results and stay in power indefinitely. 

But she doesn’t want to find out. 

Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, have tried and failed several times to get the courts to shield them from the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack and efforts to subvert the 2020 election. And she got some temporary relief in the form of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Wednesday. 

Responding to an emergency motion the Wards filed with the Supreme Court, Kagan temporarily stayed a federal judge’s order for the Wards to comply with a subpoena for phone records spanning from November 2020 through January 2021.

The move will most likely give the Wards a brief reprieve from congressional investigators until the Supreme Court ultimately rules on whether they have to comply.

Just to bring you up to speed, Kelli Ward and her husband both signed documents falsely portraying themselves as Electoral College voters. They tried to cast the state’s electoral votes to Trump, and sent those false forms to be certified by Congress on Jan. 6 — even though Joe Biden won the state. The fake electors plot is of great interest to the Jan. 6 committee, which has said Kelli Ward invoked her Fifth Amendment right repeatedly during questioning by the panel earlier this year.

For months now, Kelli Ward has been trying to keep her phone records away from the committee, arguing that it shouldn’t have jurisdiction because she says the fake electors scheme is unrelated to the Jan. 6 attack, that the committee’s scope is overly broad, and that she was acting within her First Amendment right when she engaged in this anti-democratic fake electors plot.

This tweet, sent as rioters stormed the Capitol and calling on Congress to send vote certification decisions back to the states (as Trump’s campaign wanted), seems to undermine her claim that the fake elector scheme and the Jan. 6 riot were unrelated.

The Jan. 6 committee’s letter to Ward seeking compliance with their investigation lays out the allegations of her involvement in Trump’s post-election scheme. 

The panel alleged that she pressured Arizona election officials to stop counting votes as they were tallying results. That claim is supported by messages she reportedly sent to a local election supervisor, which were unearthed by public records requests last summer. In one exchange on Nov. 13, 2020, Ward apparently tried to coordinate a call between an Arizona election supervisor and Trump as it became clear Biden was going to win the state.

The Jan. 6 committee also said it has records showing Ward spoke with Trump and his staff directly about “election certification issues in Arizona,” seemingly tying him directly to the plot to overturn the results. 

It just goes to show how important the data on the Wards’ phones might be. Perhaps, second to only Georgia, Arizona was the epicenter of the conservative movement’s efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. Kelli Ward was undeniably vocal in parroting Trump’s lies — and helping Arizona Republicans raise heaps of money off of those lies. If congressional investigators get their hands on her phone records, they could tell us how involved Trump was in feeding those lies to her.