Arizona GOP Official Accuses Kari Lake of Blackmail and Quits the Party

A top Republican official in Arizona threw in the towel on Wednesday, resigning from his position amid a public feud with Kari Lake, who he claims is “on a mission to destroy” him.

Jeff DeWit, chair of the state’s Republican Party, accused Lake of blackmailing him, after she released a recording of a private phone conversation between the two, in which he can be heard attempting to bribe the Senate candidate. Lake also allegedly threatened DeWit with a “more damaging” recording if he refused to step down.

“Since our conversation where I advised Lake to postpone her campaign and aim for the governor’s position in two years, she has been on a mission to destroy me,” DeWit said in a statement on Wednesday. “It was a suggestion made in good faith, believing it could benefit both her future prospects and the party’s overall strategy.”

“The release of our conversation by Lake confirms a disturbing tendency to exploit private interactions for personal gain and increases concerns about her habit of secretly recording personal and private conversations,” DeWit continued. “This is obviously a concern given how much interaction she has with high profile people including President Donald Trump.”

In the original, 10-minute audio clip published by The Daily Mail, DeWit—who served as chief operating officer on Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign—can be heard asking Lake to name her price to stay out of politics for the next two years, insisting that the GOP needed to make way for another candidate as Trump would not win the 2024 race and that there were “very powerful people who want to keep you out.”

“I said things I regret,” DeWit said, “but I realize when hearing Lake’s recording that I was set up. I believe she orchestrated this entire situation to have control over the state party, and it is obvious from the recording that she crafted her performance responses with the knowledge that she was recording it, intending to use this recording later to portray herself as a hero in her own story.”

Representative Dean Phillips thought he’d made a pretty good point Wednesday about the political division in the United States, but the internet was quick to show him just how badly he’d messed up.

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions.

Phillips accompanied his tweet with what appeared to be an electoral map, which was indeed primarily red. But internet users were quick to point out that the map was massively misleading for two main reasons.

First, while the map makes it look like most people vote Republican, the areas that are blue actually have higher population numbers.

Second, the map isn’t even from the most recent election.

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”

Ohio’s Republican-controlled General Assembly has voted to override Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. The measure will now become law, a further blow to LGBTQ Ohioans.

The state Senate voted 23–9 on Wednesday in favor of the override, primarily along party lines. The state House of Representatives passed the measure two weeks ago with a vote of 65–28.

Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, a Democrat, urged her colleagues not to pass the bill. She pointed out that state residents had already rejected government intervention in health care when they voted in November to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

“The voters spoke when they voted in the last election that the government should not be in charge of their health care decisions,” Antonio said.

“If what we all agree on today is that this is a complicated issue that none of us have all the answers for, I don’t understand why we would just close the door,” she continued. “We don’t know what their lives are like, but the parents do. The families do.”

House Bill 68 bans gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary teenagers. The measure applies to treatments including puberty blockers, hormones, and medical procedures; it also prohibits trans high school and college students from participating on sports teams that match their gender identity.

DeWine shocked everyone when he vetoed the bill in late December, a rare bright spot in the current onslaught of measures restricting access to gender-affirming care. DeWine cited the medical community’s support for gender-affirming care as a factor in his decision, as well as conversations he had with trans teens and their parents.

“Parents have looked me in the eye and told me that but for this treatment, their child would be dead,” he said. “And youth who are transgender have told me they are thriving today because of their transition.”

But just a week later, DeWine undid everything when he signed an executive order banning gender-affirming surgeries for minors in Ohio and even restricting access to care for adults. Under the new rules, people of any age seeking gender-affirming care must get permission from multidisciplinary teams. Those teams could include an endocrinologist, a bioethicist, a psychiatrist, and more.

Ohio is now one of the few states to mandate these extra steps, which will add an undue burden for patients. The requirements will likely rack up significant medical expenses and dramatically extend how long people must wait to access what is widely viewed as lifesaving care.

Fans of The Daily Show rejoiced on Wednesday after Comedy Central announced the triumphant return of Jon Stewart, who will serve as an executive producer and Monday host through the rest of the election cycle. Prominent Substacker Charlotte Clymer compared the news to Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA, and a U.S. senator, Jon Tester, also extended a hand in welcoming Stewart back.

But not everyone was sunshine and roses about Stewart’s new weekly gig, with some on the right complaining that the choice to bring back the show’s former 16-year host would only bring more volatility to American politics.

“Jon Stewart, who did so much to create the current political environment of inter-tribal vilification in place of argument, returns to survey the wreckage,” Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review, wrote in a post on X.

Nate Hochman, his former colleague at the conservative magazine, chimed in, “Jon Stewart’s brand of smirking, needling, speaking-truth-to-power liberalism made sense in the specific context of the Bush era, when there was at least a plausible case that the Left was ‘anti-establishment.’”

Others attempted to falsely conflate the industry’s recent wave of layoffs and hedge fund–induced instability with Stewart’s return. Right-wing podcaster and Substacker Stephen Miller tweeted:

But even some on the left dismissed the 61-year-old’s return on the basis of his canceled Apple TV+ show, The Problem With Jon Stewart. Ben Dreyfuss, formerly of Mother Jones, wrote:

New York City real estate titans Douglas and Jonathan Durst of the Durst Organization sued No Labels on Tuesday, claiming the centrist political advocacy nonprofit pulled a “bait and switch” after the group announced it had plans to run a third-party campaign in the upcoming presidential election.

The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, claimed that No Labels “lost its way” after receiving $145,000 from the cousins under the pretense that it would organize voters against partisanship and offer a home for the “politically homeless”—not stack the chances against President Joe Biden in an increasingly grave race for the White House.

The Dursts argue that the current iteration of No Labels—which claimed to be “not a third party, but rather a third bloc,” according to the moguls’ legal complaint—has “become the opposite” of what they initially set out to fund.

“The promise of promoting bipartisan government that No Labels made to donors such as the Dursts has now been irretrievably broken, and the Dursts, for one, want their money back,” reads the complaint. “They want no part of an organization that seems bent on pursuing a doomed third-party presidential bid outside the nation’s de facto two-party system.”

Although the nonprofit’s website says it has yet to commit to running a candidate in the race, it has clearly been paving the way for the possibility of doing so. Earlier this month, No Labels announced that it had gained ballot access in 13 states, from Hawaii to Maine.

“A third-party ticket option will only discourage bipartisan reform because it will take votes away from one of the major political candidates, giving an advantage to the other candidate,” the suit says.

But a leader and lawyer for No Labels, Dan Webb, described the suit to Courthouse News as “frivolous,” pointing out that the Durst cousins last sent checks to the nonprofit in 2020 and 2017. Webb told The New York Times that No Labels’s “fundamental mission has never changed.”

“This is nothing more than an organized distraction. Douglas’ last contribution was six years ago, and Jody’s last contribution was over three years ago. These contributions were spent on priorities that the Dursts had no complaints about at the time,” Webb told Courthouse News. But as they say, money—much like No Labels’ convictions—is fungible.