Arizona Daily Star reports the new contracts came just days after Arizona agreed to remove containers illegally dumped in the Yuma sector by the beginning of this week, with a date to remove containers illegally dumped in Cochise County to be determined. That agreement resulted from a Biden administration lawsuit that followed the Ducey administration ignoring numerous federal agencies that had informed it that the illegal “wall” was being stacked without federal permission.
All in all, by the time it’s over, the former Republican governor’s illegal stunt will have cost Arizona taxpayers at least $170 million dollars. But it appears that he’s not entirely done bilking taxpayers, because the Arizona Daily Star said that Ducey’s “private attorney—hired with state tax dollars—filed legal papers in federal court less than a week ago to keep alive a separate lawsuit he filed asking a judge to declare there is no federal ownership of the land.”
It’s unclear how that will proceed since Democrat Katie Hobbs has now been sworn in as the new governor and his lawsuit has now become her lawsuit. Arizona Daily Star reported that a Hobbs press aide called the shipping containers “a political stunt that backfired at the taxpayers’ expense.’’ Her Republican opponent in the 2022 race, Kari “I’m actually going to serve eight years as governor” Lake, had pledged to continue the stunt. Maybe she’ll issue an executive order from the fake governor’s office she’s probably set up in her house, snort.
Ducey and his office, meanwhile, continue to insist there was a point to this stupid stunt. “We know that local law enforcement officials, like the sheriffs in Cochise and Yuma County, were both appreciative of the effort because it made their job to protect their communities a little bit easier,” staffer C.J. Karamargin told Arizona Daily Star. Notice that Karamargin conveniently left out Santa Cruz County’s sheriff, who had vowed to arrest anyone who illegally dumped containers in his jurisdiction.
Karamargin also continues to lie about the stunt somehow spurring the federal government to action. “He said it was not until the containers started to go up that the Biden administration contracted to have the U.S. government fill some of the gaps left in the border wall started under former President Donald Trump,” the Arizona Daily Star continued.
But as that report notes, and we also reported, the Biden administration had already announced last summer that it was going to fill those gaps. Ducey’s illegal stunt was announced after the administration’s plans. Federal officials have said Ducey had actually been actively impeding that plan by getting in the way. AshBritt, meanwhile, previously donated $500,000 to a political committee aligned with the insurrectionist former president. That donation sparked a complaint since it was a federal contractor at the time and those kind of donations are a no-no. AshBritt’s then-CEO Randal Perkins ended up paying a $125,000 fine in 2021. He’s currently listed as an “operations advisor” on the company’s website.
Just what a fucking waste of everything (though AshBritt probably doesn’t think so), and undoubtedly was nothing more than a campaign stunt that Ducey will use wherever his political ambitions take him next, like challenging Arizona’s senior U.S. senate seat in 2024, perhaps. Republican base voters in the state probably won’t care that he wasted nearly $180 million of their tax dollars because they’ll still falsely claim it’s those immigrants who are wasting resources even though they’re casting a ballot for the guy doing the actual wasting. But when it comes to other voters who can be swayed, Democrats shouldn’t shut up for one single moment about Ducey’s illegal vanity project that was anything but pretty and effective.
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