Kari Lake shot down again as court refuses to toss election official's defamation case

The Arizona Court of Appeals has decided, for now, to stay out of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s defamation suit against Kari Lake.

The appeals court on Wednesday declined to take up Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Kari Lake’s request to overturn a lower court judge’s decision not to dismiss Richer’s case.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jay Adleman on Dec. 20 threw out both of Lake’s motions to dismiss the case.

Richer, who is also a Republican, filed the suit in June after months of attacks from Lake and her followers, who accused him without evidence of rigging the 2022 election for Arizona governor against her.

Lake lost that race by more than 17,000 votes to Katie Hobbs, but spent the next year on an unsuccessful court case to try to overturn the results of that election. Judges in trial, appeals and the Arizona Supreme Court all ruled that Lake and her lawyers provided insufficient evidence that the 2022 election was sabotaged by Richer, Maricopa County or anyone else.

Lake has never conceded her loss in the race, even after announcing her bid for U.S. Senate in October.

In December, Lake’s lawyers attempted to convince Adleman that her claims about Richer were nothing more than “rhetorical hyperbole” and were not meant to be taken as facts, but the judge didn’t buy that argument.

Arizona State University’s First Amendment Clinic also argued on Lake’s behalf, saying that the case should be dismissed because it violated Arizona’s Strategic Action Against Public Participation law, with claims that Richer filed the suit specifically to quash Lake’s First Amendment right to free speech.

Adleman shot down that argument, as well.

Richer is suing Lake for her repeated insistence that he was involved in the “injection” of 300,000 illegal early ballots in Maricopa County on Election Day 2022, and that he took part in intentionally programming ballot printers to print incorrectly-sized ballot images, causing tabulators to reject those ballots on Election Day.

Lake used both of these claims in her court challenges to the results of the 2022 election, and the courts rejected each of them.

Adleman also found in December that Richer had provided sufficient evidence that Lake made statements about him with “actual malice,” meaning she knew that the claims were false, or recklessly disregarded whether they were true or false.

Public officials like Richer must prove actual malice to win defamation cases, a higher bar than for the average citizen.

Lake took to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, to comment about the case on Wednesday.

“They’re trying to take away our protected political speech so nobody running for office will be able to speak out and criticize elected officials,” Lake wrote. “They’re trying to criminalize honest journalism and our freedom of the press. They’re trying to prevent moms and dads from going to school board meetings and criticizing their representatives.If this is successful, it will be the death of our First Amendment.”

As the case proceeds toward a trial, Lake is busy campaigning for Senate — she announced that she raised $2.1 million in the first quarter of her campaign — as well as stumping for fellow election denier President Donald Trump in his attempt to retake the office of president.

Lake was scheduled to speak at a Trump event in Iowa on Thursday, ahead of the state’s caucuses next week, according to the Trump campaign.

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