Kari Lake won’t contest claims she defamed Arizona election official

Kari Lake signaled on Tuesday that she will not contest claims that she lied about a top Arizona election official and defamed him, a significant legal concessionfrom the Arizona Republican who has become one of the country’s most prominent election deniers.

Stephen Richer, the top election official in Maricopa county, sued Lake, her campaign and an aligned Pac last year after she lost her gubernatorial bid and repeatedly lied about him. Lake, who is now running for the US Senate, falsely accused him of injecting 300,000 illegal votes into machines and intentionally misprinting ballots so they would be rejected by ballot tabulators.

Richer said the claims turned the lives of him and his family “upside down” and made them “the targets of threats of violence, even death”. He asked a jury to award compensatory and punitive damages and wants Lake and her team to remove all false information about him from the internet.

In a court filing on Tuesday, Lake essentially conceded she won’t try to prove that her claims were true or that she had a reasonable basis to believe they were. Instead, she asked a Maricopa county judge to quickly set a hearing for a “default judgment” against her and move to hold a hearing to determine what damages, if any, she should have to pay. Lake is still requesting the empaneling of a jury to resolve any factual disputes around the damages issues.

Richer and lawyers for Protect Democracy, a non-profit organization representing him, said Lake’s filing was essentially a surrender and claimed victory. “After months of doubling down and defending their lies across Arizona, in the media, and on social media, when push came to shove, the defendants decided to completely back down and concede that their lies