Kari Lake stalls discovery in defamation suit

After months of stalling, a judge has for a second time ordered Kari Lake and her husband to hand over documents to Stephen Richer that pertain to her defamatory statements about the Maricopa County Recorder.

Lake, the Republican nominee for U.S. senator from Arizona in the November election, shared lies about Richer on podcasts and social media after she lost the 2022 election for Arizona governor and labored to blame that loss on nonexistent election fraud. In her ongoing attempt to get the courts to overturn her loss in that election, Lake failed to prove that any fraud took place, and the attorneys who represented her were disciplined for lying to the court.

She claimed that Richer, who is also a Republican, “intentionally” made changes to ballot printers that resulted in Election Day printing problems because he wanted “to sabotage the 2022 general election.” And, Lake repeatedly asserted, Richer was responsible for 300,000 “illegal, invalid, phony or bogus” early ballots being counted in Maricopa County.

While Lake has continued to say publicly that her statements about Richer were true, she accepted a default judgment in March, meaning that she legally conceded to the court that the statements were false. She later said she defaulted because she didn’t want to participate in a “witch hunt” and accused Richer of using the lawsuit to distract her from her run for Senate.

Richer filed the suit in June 2023 against Lake, her husband, her campaign and a nonprofit company that raised money on her behalf after dealing with months of unfounded claims from Lake and her supporters that he orchestrated election fraud in Maricopa County’s 2022 election.

Since the default judgment, the lawsuit has been in the discovery phase, but Richer and the attorneys representing him have struggled to compel Lake to hand over a long list of documents and communications pertaining to her false claims.

These documents would serve to show how the false claims that Lake made about Richer were disseminated and to how many people, the people involved in concocting the lies and any possible financial incentive for doing so.

The discovery process will help the court determine how much in damages Richer is owed for money spent on things like security cameras, and how much Lake should pay for damage she caused to his reputation. Lake’s wealth will be considered to help determine punitive damages.

“Lake’s continued stonewalling is indefensible,” Daniel Maynard, an attorney for Richer, wrote to the court on Aug. 2. “While Lake is free to file yet another meritless (appeal), she may not simply defy the Court’s order because she disagrees with it.”

But Lake’s attorney, Dennis Wilenchik, argued to the court that many of Richer’s document requests to both Lake and her husband, Jeff Halperin, were outside of the scope of the lawsuit. He accused Richer of chasing social media clout, saying the county recorder was only requesting some of the documents so that he could post them on the social media site X, formerly Twitter.

“Despite Plaintiff Richer’s efforts, the judicial system is not a tool for political campaigns and rivalries, and should not be used as one here,” Wilenchik told the court on Aug. 2.

While the judge instructed Richer to narrow his requests, he also told Lake and Halperin to hand over some of the documents.

“The Court directed the parties to narrow the issues with respect to document production,” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner wrote in an Aug. 14 ruling. “They have done the opposite. Instead of reasonably tailoring the requests, Plaintiff has expanded them. Instead of producing documents on subjects the Court has already deemed relevant, Defendant repeats unwarranted objections.”

Warner explained that, as he had previously ruled on July 10, Richer was entitled to documents from Lake that are “relevant to the dissemination of false statements, and to Defendant’s degree of culpability.”

But he added that Richer filed far too many “broad requests” for documents, and issued a list of 11 categories of documents that he deemed relevant to the case. Warner ordered Lake to supply those documents to Richer by Aug. 26, and to submit a signed affidavit to the court by the same date detailing her search for the documents.

“After months of dragging their feet, the defendants have now been ordered by the court to produce documents and respond to discovery requests,” Janine Lopez, an attorney for Richer, told the Arizona Mirror.

Documents in the list included any analysis that Lake or her team made of media reports about the defamatory social media posts she made about Richer, communications with or between Kari Lake for Arizona or workers for Save Arizona Fund — a “dark money” nonprofit that Lake formed after the 2022 election to raise unlimited sums without disclosing donors — about the social media posts and documents showing an effort to fact-check those posts.

Others on the list were any analysis that Lake or her team made of media coverage of events or podcasts where she made defamatory statements about Richer and any communications or solicitations for donations that Lake sent which included a link to any of Lake’s defamatory comments and how much money she raised from those communications.

Lake agreed to produce some categories of documents, including those related to her and her husband’s wealth, which the courts take into consideration when determining punitive damages in civil cases.

Richer’s attorneys had previously subpoenaed several other people for information they might possess regarding Lake’s false statements, including Colton Duncan, Lake’s campaign manager in her bid for Arizona governor; Merissa Hamilton, a conservative activist and the executive director of Save Arizona Fund; Mike Lindell, the election conspiracy theorist and CEO of “MyPillow”; and Michael “Malice” Krechmer, a podcaster and Fox News contributor.

The only person on that list who has provided documents so far is Hamilton, who printed 100,000 pages of physical documents instead of providing them digitally. Hamilton told the court that the cover letter accompanying the subpoena from Richer’s attorneys did not specify that the documents should be provided electronically. She asked for more than $32,000 in reimbursement for the time and cost to locate them and make copies.

Maynard argued that Richer should not be responsible for the cost of printing the documents since he did not specifically request them in physical form and any attorney would know that the request was for documents in their original form, in this case, digital.

But Warner conceded that the subpoena was lengthy and likely to be confusing for a lay person, and ordered Richer to reimburse Hamilton $25,000 upon receipt of the documents.

Hamilton delivered the physical copies to Richer on Aug. 21, as ordered by the court.

Warner denied Hamilton’s request for an additional $7,000 in for clerical costs because the bill she presented wasn’t itemized “and because 280 hours — the equivalent of seven people working full-time for a week — is an unreasonable amount of time to spend on producing documents.”

He also ordered Hamilton to provide the documents in digital form, for which Hamilton requested to again be reimbursed.

Over the next few months, Lake and the other defendants in the case are expected to produce documents and give depositions, with a trial to determine how much Richer is owed in damages, expected to happen sometime in 2025, with a pre-trial conference set for February.

“We look forward to reviewing the information, taking depositions, and making our case on behalf of our client at trial next year,” Lopez, an attorney for Richer, told the Mirror.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and X.