Things have been quite messy for the Maricopa County Democratic Party over the last year or so; one might call it the Bruce Franks Jr. Effect. We recommend getting up to date in our write-ups here and here. But recently after some more internal consternation and party disagreements we found out just how bad things were (and presumably still are) and find ourselves amazed that the torches and pitchforks have largely stayed out of sight.
As a brief round-up, tens of thousands of dollars were allocated to a mail piece that never went out. It was blatantly obvious that it didn’t because the price that was supposedly quoted was too low for even the smallest of postcard mail pieces. The money went to Mr. Franks Jr., the embattled battle rapper/”campaign consultant”/disgraced former Missouri legislator and fiancee of MCDP Executive Director Ne’Lexia Galloway. Apparently everyone who brought up the absurdity of this entire arrangement was silenced at first, and fired by Galloway later.
Well we have since learned some amazingly horrific nuggets of information. In an email sent from a Democrat precinct committee-person in response to a bizarre and incredibly defensive email from MCDP Chair Nancy Schriber, PC Steven Jackson publicly rips into the entire organization, calling them out for dishonesty and incompetence. And he has every right to.
Perhaps most damning however is that he attached the statement from then-MCDP Treasurer Heather Mrowiec which you can find for yourself here. And you might want to get some popcorn and sit down for this blockbuster of a statement.
Mrowiec, the person whose job it was to retrieve documentation for expenses and flag any problems, internally brought up how the transaction was not a serious one, but more than that, how there was strong evidence of doctored documentation; i.e. actual fraud. She then states how both Chair Schriber and ED Galloway both purposely impeded the investigation and did their best to cover it up as she tried to claw those funds back.
If this was the real world, people would get arrested for this. But in the political world, the truth-tellers and honest people get silenced, and the liars and cheats get away with it, or at worst move to the next state to con the next group of suckers, a la Bruce Franks Jr.
This scandal is far worse than any reasonable people could possibly assume. Not just the incompetence of poorly spent money and bad results, such as the historic underperformance of their biggest countywide candidate Julie Gunnigle. This certainly appears to be fraud followed by a cover-up.
There is only one appropriate outcome in the wake of these revelations: MCDP Chair Nancy Schriber and Executive Director Ne’Lexia Galloway must resign.