The timing is not helpful for Paul Babeu’s campaign for Congress.
But was it really deliberate?
News emerged Wednesday night that the FBI had delivered a subpoena from a federal grand jury to the Arizona Public Safety Foundation, a Pinal County-based charity.
It matters to Babeu and the campaign for the U.S. House in Congressional District 1 because the foundation has received much of the money that the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department, under Babeu, has seized under forfeiture laws. The foundation is closely aligned with the department and Babeu and has been accused of spending money to benefit his political career.
Interviewed by host Garrett Lewis on KNST, 790-AM, Thursday morning, Babeu suggested the FBI’s actions were politically motivated.
“Clearly, there’s a political agenda afoot,” Babeu said, going on to add: “Sadly, in a political environment, all these attacks all these questions come out just before an election. You don’t have to be a cop to figure this out, what’s going on here.”
So, what Babeu seemed to be saying is that the FBI deliberately waited until after he was nominated last week in the Republican primary to deliver this grand-jury subpoena.
But of course, the subpoena itself is usually secret. It only became known because a copy was sent to the Pinal County government, which was the source of forfeited money sent to the foundation.
Pinal County Supervisor Steve Miller — a Republican like Babeu but also a longtime adversary of the sheriff — saw the subpoena, he told me. Miller said a FBI agent interviewed him for three hours in late July about the foundation’s spending, and he criticized what he considered unethical use of the money and property seized from suspected criminals.
“In my interpretation, they’re using it simply as a laundering operation,” he said. “They give it to the public safety foundation, which goes and pays for what they want. They’ve used it for everything from travel to challenge coins, patches and all kinds of stuff.”
Miller’s fellow Republican supervisor, Anthony Smith, has also complained about the spending of RICO money on activities such as youth dance clubs, and that the sheriff inevitably gets a campaign-benefiting photo op when handing the checks over. He’d rather see the money spent on overtime for deputies.
“The higher priority should be to fight crime in the high-crime neighborhoods,” he said.
Later Thursday, Babeu’s campaign issued a statement decrying the subpoena story as “another smear.”
“The sheriff’s office is not the target of an FBI investigation, period,” he says in the statement. “All RICO monies coming from the sheriff’s office have been reviewed and approved by either the County Attorney or Arizona Attorney General and have a history of receiving bipartisan support.”
“Simply put, I have no ability to spend any RICO money,” he went on. “The money confiscated from criminals is forfeited to the county by a judge and goes towards improving our communities, in part by supporting groups like the Girl Scouts, Maricopa American Legion, Superior Substance Abuse Coalition, YMCA, Alliance Against Family Abuse, and many more.”
All that said — if the FBI is not targeting the sheriff’s office, and if Babeu doesn’t have control over how the money is spent, how can this be a FBI-orchestrated smear of him? Maybe he’s protesting too much.
Pinal turnover
Speaking of Babeu, one of the less-noted aspects of the primary election was the loss by the Babeu-aligned “law and order team” in the races for sheriff and county attorney.
Babeu’s Chief Deputy, Steve Henry, lost the Republican nomination for sheriff to Mark Lamb, by a margin of 62 percent to 37 percent. Lamb will take on Democrat Kaye Dickson in the general election.
County Attorney Lando Voyles, who unseated Democrat Jim Walsh with Babeu’s help in 2012, himself was defeated in the GOP primary by Kent Volkmer, by a margin of 58 to 31 percent. Volkmer will not face Democratic Party opposition in the general.
It seems to suggest a decline in Babeu’s political strength in Pinal County. But then again, he was the top vote-getter by a longshot in his race for the nomination in CD1. He took 43 percent of the vote in a six-candidate ballot.
Kirkpatrick protests ... again
Last week, I noted that Democrats and U.S. Senate candidate Ann Kirkpatrick were rightfully protesting a poster created by Republicans and delivered to her office. It was an Old West-style “Wanted” poster featuring Kirkpatrick’s face. The problem was that the poster also featured illustrated bullet holes.
That was in bad taste, and frankly, the Republican Party should have apologized for it.
However, this week, Kirkpatrick’s campaign is pushing the apology demands too far. They asked that the McCain campaign take down an ad featuring video of Kirkpatrick fleeing a town hall in Holbrook in 2009.
Specifically, they sent out a statement by Navajo County Sheriff KC Clark saying that he had asked Kirkpatrick to leave the Safeway where the event was taking place, out of concern for public safety.
The only problem, as the McCain campaign was quick to point out, is that Clark offered a different explanation to the White Mountain Independent in 2009:
“She was trying to talk one-on-one and it just didn’t work out. That seemed to anger people. She wanted to talk one-on-one and people weren’t going to let her do that. She didn’t want to talk to a crowd, so what’s the sense in staying? Nothing would be accomplished.”
McCain en Español
McCain, by the way, launched a bare bones campaign website in Spanish recently. The trick? As the Washington Post first noted, it had some big differences from his English-language website on the key issue of immigration.
The English-language website noted his role in efforts to secure the border with Mexico. The Spanish-language site emphasized how he led an effort toward a more “humane” policy of immigration reform.
Arizona voters have seen McCain try to straddle this ravine before but never in such stark, simultaneous contrast.
