Lake Faces Questions over her Save Arizona Fund as Defamation Case Unfolds
Monday, August 26th, 2024
ARIZONA -– Today, Kari Lake was ordered by a judge to turn over documents in the defamation case against her after “months of stalling.” Her continued delay raises questions about her nonprofit, Save Arizona Fund (SAF) – the “millions of dollars that Kari Lake through this fund was able to raise and potentially even spend” and the fact that the organization “never turned over the financial disclosures to the IRS.”
Save Arizona Fund is the subject of an IRS complaint that outlines how “Lake has been using Save Arizona Fund as a way to fund her lawsuits that sought to overturn the results of the 2022 election, in which she lost.”
WATCH:
KATY TUR: “Kari Lake running for Senate there in Arizona for the Republican ticket. Today is her deadline to produce a list of documents in a defamation lawsuit filed against her. What’s this about?”
VAUGHN HILLYARD: “This is the big one. Stephen Richer, he is the Maricopa county recorder, the one who is overseeing the tabulating of the votes in Maricopa county. He’s a Republican. He’s doing it again in 2024, he did it in 2022. Kari Lake claims she won the election in 2022, which she did not, and she said a lot of things about Stephen Richer to the extent he helped oversee what was a fraudulent election. He filed a defamation suit and so as part of this, the judge ordered her to turn over evidence as part of the discovery process. One of the big things that she is being forced by the judge to turnover, that I am particularly interested in, is how much money did she raise through what is called the Save Arizona Fund after the 2022 election. She and that fund still have never turned over the financial disclosures to the IRS. We’re talking about potentially millions of dollars that Kari Lake and advisers made off of her fraudulent election claims, kind of sounds like Donald Trump in 2020. So as part of this defamation suit, Stephen Richer, who’s likely going to be getting that amount of money, and frankly Katy, I don’t know how much it is, but we may be looking at millions of dollars that Kari Lake through this fund was able to raise and potentially even spend for travel to Iowa, travel to Mar-a-Lago, travel for hotels. There’s a lot of questions that we as the public don’t have answers to but because of this defamation suit, we may get, just over two months until this election.”