In recent weeks, bombshell news broke that Donald Trump’s 2020 election pressure campaign was not, in fact, limited to the state of Georgia, where the former president made that infamous phone call to GA’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, telling the state official to “find the votes” he needed to overthrow Joe Biden’s historical victory is the southern, traditionally Red swing state.
As it turned out, the disgraced ex-president launched a very similar pressure campaign in the state of Arizona, where he also surprisingly lost the vote to his Democratic opponent. As that pressure campaign grows scrutiny from the DOJ in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald’s attempts to overthrow a United States presidential election, more and more details are beginning to come to light concerning not only what Trump did, but how officials in the state of Arizona handled it.
Part of the revelations that recently went public was Trump’s alleged attempt to pressure then-Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey into essentially the same thing he attempted with Raffensperger. But, according to new reporting from the Washington Post, there’s more to the story still.
It seems that, despite Donald Trump’s blatant efforts to destroy Ducey’s career and prevent him from mounting a successful U.S. Senate campaign by publicly branding the former governor as a disloyal traitor, Ducey still chose to cling tight to one of the ex-president’s most damning secrets in what appeared to be an effort to protect the man who was trying to destroy him.
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WaPo reports that video footage showed the then-AZ governor actively signing the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the state as Donald Trump simultaneously made an 11th-hour phone call to Ducey in a last-ditch attempt to steal the state back into his own favor. According to MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown, Ducey kept Donald’s desperately pathetic pressure campaign attempts a secret from the American public — even as Trump singlehandedly dismantled and destroyed the now ex-governor’s professional life in retaliation for his brutal loss in Arizona.
Brown writes, “In his apparent desire to keep the peace with Trump, Ducey kept details of the pressure campaign a secret and withheld information the American people deserved to know.”
Word of Trump’s desperate attempts eventually got around, as an anonymous Republican donor learned of the pressure campaign against Ducey during a meal with the ex-Republican governor, and two other sources further corroborated the claims, yet Ducey remained loyal to Donald Trump, refusing to go public with the information or to inform law enforcement officials of the attempted pressure campaign, even as Trump made it his mission to destroy any chance at a political career that Ducey had to his name. Even as election deniers began to fill the seats of high-ranking positions in his state and Arizona taxpayers were left footing the bill for Trump’s deranged, desperate investigations into the election, Ducey remained steadfast in his secrecy to Trump.
“Ducey’s reticence is hard to parse,” Brown writes. “It didn’t serve his own political ambitions. It didn’t serve the interests of his party statewide, not when he could have used his voice to push back against the likes of failed gubernatorial candidate-slash-conspiracy theorist Kari Lake. In the end, I can think of only one person whose interests it did serve: Donald Trump — a man who most likely still can’t stand him.”
I cannot imagine that it was worth it.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
