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State Senate President Russell Pearce and his political hatchet-bearer Constantin Querard must have Tom Ryan dolls they push pins into at night. Attorney Ryan, who brought the lawsuit that forced sham candidate Olivia Cortes out of the recall race in Legislative District 18, is coming after Pearce and Querard like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator flicks.
“I’m an officer of the court,” he told Horizon host Ted Simons last night. “And just like a judge, or a member of the state Legislature, I take an oath to preserve the Constitution and I take it seriously. This is an area I know, this is an area I love, and when I see something going wrong like that, I will not hesitate to step in.”
Querard and Pearce should know better than to mess with an Irishman. Scions of the Emerald Isle and their descendants don’t walk away from a fight.
By contrast, Mesa attorney H. Micheal Wright is the iron fist in the velvet glove. He’s penned an op-ed and sent it to me on Cortes-gate. (See below.) Soon, he and Ryan will be turning their files over to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and other investigative authorities.
That means AG Tom Horne is on notice: Do nothing with this case of outrageous election fraud, and you’ll be forever regarded as no more than a self-serving partisan, lacking the integrity to follow through on your oath of office.
WATERGATE: A COMMENTARY ON WHAT IT ALL
MEANS
By H. Micheal Wright
The Arizona
Constitution, Article 7 section 12 charges the Legislature with the duty to
“maintain the purity of elections.”
that attempting to place a “diversionary candidate” on the ballot is
illegal. A “diversionary candidate” is
one who is in the race solely to divert votes from a particular candidate so as
to give an advantage to another candidate.
The recent lawsuit to have Olivia Cortes removed from the race was filed
to honor the rule of law. The trial
court found that she had been placed on the ballot to divert Hispanic votes and
was therefore a “sham” candidate. She was not a serious candidate, but a
willing pawn in a sleazy scheme. She is
gone, although her name remains on the ballot.
But more important questions than simply whether Cortes was a sham
candidate remain unresolved.
The lawsuit
served as a tool to remove a sham candidate.
But the ethical questions the lawsuit raises are larger than simply the
question of whether Cortes should be a candidate in this historic recall
election. How is it that a group of
anonymous people, people who are behind this sham candidacy, remain anonymous? With all the publicity about the matter, why
must there be calls for investigations?
All that needs to happen is for the people responsible for this stain on
our State to come forward, confess their guilt and apologize to the
voters. But that won’t happen.
The fact
that there are secret conspiring actors who are unquestionably supporters of
Russell Pearce, and that they chose to remain anonymous, tells us that they
recognize that what they have done is illegal or at least embarrassing. And that should bother us. It should bother us because if a candidate
and/or his campaign advisors and leading supporters can engage in skullduggery
like this, they can do the same once in office.
Persons who are willing to attempt to deceive voters can attempt to make
backroom deals and pull special favors for their friends; they can line their
pockets in exchange for promises to offer Bills and vote a certain way. People with political connections who lack
integrity like this can engage in piracy and favoritism and retaliations. Concern about this is the main issue that
this recent bit of political intrigue should focus on.
Who paid to
have petitions for Cortes to be circulated?
Cortes says she doesn’t know; Western, Cortes’ campaign “everything”,
testified he didn’t know. Who paid for
Cortes’ signs? Who else circulated
petitions to gather signatures from among their friends? Who asked his family members to help with
Cortes’ campaign? Who told the boss of
the hired petition circulators to tell people that a signature for Cortes would
help Pearce? Who set up and paid for
Cortes’ Website and wrote the press releases?
Who coordinated all this? Someone
did – someone who knows how to run a campaign and develop a tricky strategy of
getting someone on the ballot, getting some name recognition out there, and all
the while remaining anonymous – someone with money and a Machiavellian mind.
And what of
Russell Pearce in all of this? With his
campaign people, his family and his Tea Party friends in on the scheme, what
has he done to answer these questions?
He has not called for answers. What
has been discussed in campaign meetings where Greg Western attended, wearing
two hats – Cortes’ campaign advisor and Pearce campaign committee member? What has been said at the Pearce dinner
table? Here we have an illegal scheme, done
to get Pearce elected, and he pretends to know nothing. If he were a man of truth and integrity, a
candidate who meant it when he told the voters he would “run a clean campaign”,
he would have every one of those implicated in his office demanding that they
come clean, for they have hurt his reputation.
Until the anonymous benefactors of the Pearce campaign who were involved
in this illegal scheme come forward, we are left to wonder what Pearce knew.
