Arizona State Representative Alexander Kolodin spoke to the Gateway Pundit this week about the incoming Katie Hobbs and Kris Mayes administrations and Republicans’ plans to hold Democrats accountable to pass election integrity legislation.
Alex Kolodin is the Vice Chair of the House Elections Committee.
Kolodin explained his position on the Arizona Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit, saying we need to “defund the EIU.” Kolodin believes that under Kris Mayes, the EIU will become “a machine for prosecuting conservative activists.” He further referenced the targeting of January 6 prisoners and conservative activists.
Kolodin, an attorney for the AZGOP and other conservatives, cited his work defending Clean Elections USA, where “a team of 30 National Lawyers” were sent to Arizona to target and harass “essentially one woman.”
The Gateway Pundit previously reported that days before the election, a federal judge banned cameras at Arizona drop boxes after Hillary attorney Marc Elias and his goons sued a small grassroots group for watching the dropboxes and photographing for illegal activity.
As The Gateway Pundit recently reported, Marc Elias ally Daniel Barr, who worked for DNC law firm Perkins Coie, will reportedly become Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ new Chief Deputy AG to enforce her woke, radical agenda.
Kris Mayes told reporters, “the Election Integrity Unit is going to become a Voter Protection Unit” to “fight any effort by anyone to eliminate vote by mail,” and prosecute alleged voter intimidation and alleged intimidation of election officials.
“There are occasionally, maybe, a handful of cases of alleged voter fraud,” Mayes said. “There are not very many cases like that. We are going to use this unit to protect the right of voters to access the ballot box, to protect our elections officials against death threats. It’s unacceptable, and it will be prosecuted when I am Attorney General.”
“It’s going to be pretty soon where you’re gonna be watching your back every time you open your mouth unless this legislature exercises the power of the purse to deprive Kris Mayes the ability to do that,” said Representative Kolodin.
On Election Day in Maricopa County, over 50% of tabulators and printers failed the moment that polls opened, causing voters to be turned away from the polls and creating long wait times of four hours or more. According to cybersecurity expert Clay Parikh’s testimony, this was an intentional act aimed at disenfranchising Republican voters who turned out 3:1 for Trump-Endorsed candidates. County Elections officials failed to give an adequate explanation of these failures and seemingly lied under oath in Kari Lake’s recent trial. This and other election catastrophes in Maricopa County possibly stole the election from Kari Lake and Kris Mayes’ opponent Abe Hamadeh.
Read the latest updates on Kari Lake and Abe Hamadeh’s historic election lawsuits!
Republicans in the legislature showed Katie Hobbs on Monday that they will not back down to her woke agenda.
The Gateway Pundit reported that Kolodin, a member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, fired a warning shot at Katie Hobbs and Democrats who refuse to secure elections and told them to pound sand on Monday before Hobbs gave her first State of the State address.
Brave members of the Arizona Legislature and the Arizona Freedom Caucus later turned their backs on Katie Hobbs, walked out of her yearly State of the State address Monday, and slammed her in a new statement for the “election riddled with violations of Arizona law” and her embrace of “the left’s extreme, woke agenda.”
Hours earlier, the Arizona Freedom Caucus announced a lawsuit against Katie Hobbs’ “tyrannical” use of executive authority. Just moments after she was sworn into office on Monday, January 2, Hobbs signed her gender-affirming Executive Order titled “Protecting Employment Opportunity,” and she signed three additional Executive Orders in her first week.
It was all incredible!
The Arizona Freedom Caucus and MAGA Republicans showed utter contempt for this new regime.
Arizona State Senator Jake Hoffman discussed the AZ Freedom Caucus’ incoming lawsuit against Katie Hobbs’ executive orders, the GOP’s defiance of The Hobbs regime, and potential investigations into 2022 Election fraud with The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson earlier this week.
Hoffman also revealed rumors that Katie Hobbs is planning “to force teachers and students in our public schools to use the gender pronoun of someone’s choice, not the gender pronoun of their actual birth certificate, not whether they’re a boy or a girl.”
State Rep. Alexander Kolodin shared his thoughts on Katie Hobbs, defunding the EUI, and what he looks forward to this session on the House Elections Committee.
Watch the full interview below.
Conradson: You and the Freedom Caucus really stuck it to Katie Hobbs on Monday before her State of the State address. How do you plan to hold Democrats accountable while Katie Hobbs is still in the Governor’s office?
Kolodin: Well, what I want to say is my comment was a mirror of what Hobbs has said. She had talked about people that she will work with and people that are opposed, and I always believe in matching the tone of one’s opponents. And so I talked about sticking it to Katie Hobbs, but I also talked about working across the aisle on things that everybody should agree on, like transparency in our elections, like stabilizing our water supply and all of that, and it’s the people who are just dedicated to being partisans and depriving voters of the right to know what’s going on in their elections. Those are the people that need to be opposed. But there are some concrete things, even in a divided government, that the legislature can do to protect the rights of voters and citizens of this state. One of the things that may seem counterintuitive to conservatives is we absolutely have to strip the line item from the budget for funding for election integrity at the AGs office. And that’s sad to say, but unless Hamed, Abe prevails on his challenge, and I hope that he will, but unless he does, that unit is going to be weaponized, and it’s going to be turned into a machine for prosecuting conservative activists. And so we have to make sure that funding is gone. Similarly, what we’ve seen from the governor while she was Secretary of State is the use of $1,000 an hour attorneys and $500-$1000 an hour attorneys to carry out a litigation agenda that’s outside the purview of her office. In this state, the AG is the chief law enforcement agent, the taxpayer already pays for that, and we need to make sure that the budget makes clear that if you’re the governor, you have to use the attorneys the taxpayers already provided for you; you can’t spend their money on $1,000 An hour lawyers. So, these are various things that we can do to hold the Governor accountable to following the law to constrain her to the proper scope of government. And as well, there’s various other tools that the legislature has had. We’ve had a lot of planning meetings about that, but I won’t tip my hand just yet.
Conradson: Kris Mayes is bringing on this Daniel Barr — he’s a Mark Elias ally — to be her Deputy Chief at the AGs office. And they’re going to be using this election integrity unit to actually go after what they would call “voter intimidation.” They’re going to be targeting conservatives who care about election integrity. Do you have anything more to say about that?
Kolodin: Yeah, you know, our law firm is one of the firms that defends Clean Elections USA in a suit that was brought by some of Elias’s people against them for exercising their constitutionally protected First Amendment protected activities of monitoring dropboxes and protesting the installation of dropboxes through their monitoring. And it was chilling that you had a team of 30 National Lawyers come after this organization, which is essentially one woman, just to make an example of her, and if we allow Kris Mayes to go down that road if we don’t defund the EIU. That’s going to happen to a lot of conservatives just for speaking out. You can see that happening with the J6 committee or what happened with the J6 committee, and the DOJ investigation of these attempts to turn allegations that somebody protested to their election officials, not the people who broken the Capitol on J6, but people who said to elections officials or allegedly sent to elections officials, “don’t certify that election,” and turn that into a crime. And it’s going to be pretty soon where you’re gonna be watching your back every time you open your mouth unless this legislature exercises the power of the purse to deprive Kris Mayes the ability to do that.
Conradson: You’re the Vice Chair of elections so this is a hot issue to you. What are you looking forward to most with your committee this session and also just with legislation on elections?
Kolodin: There’s a couple of things that we’re really looking forward to on the committee., The first thing is, I do think, believe it or not, if we can get past the partnership partisanship, there is common ground on elections, everybody agrees I think it’d be good a couple of beers in them. Everybody agrees that more transparency in elections is good. It gives voters more power. And incidentally, it also makes our elections more secure to have more eyes on the process. I’m very hopeful that a bill to make ballot images a public record and to conform Arizona law to the Motor Voter Act, which says that the cast record needs to be a public record too. Very hopeful that that will garner bipartisan support. Of course, as you know, the legislature also has very powerful and important oversight function. And so just because we’re the legislature, we’re primarily geared towards making laws, doesn’t mean that we don’t need information about whether the existing laws are adequate to protect voters. And so we’re going to be looking very hard at the process of how elections are going to be conducted in the run-up to 2024 to make sure that what happened this travesty that happened this year in our election, where you’ve had machines go down all across Maricopa County on Election Day to make sure that doesn’t repeat itself. Our committee takes that very seriously.
