WA taxpayers paid for three state lawmakers to attend election conspiracy event

Your tax dollars pay for schools, roads, and parks in Washington state. This past summer, they also paid for three Republican state lawmakers to attend a conspiracy theory conference in South Dakota that perpetuated the big lie about the 2020 election.

Jim Brunner covers politics for The Seattle Times. He told KUOW’s Kim Malcolm about the story.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: Tell us more about this event over the summer. What was it exactly?

Jim Brunner: Mike Lindell, who people know as the My Pillow CEO, has kind of reinvented himself and may be known just as much now for perpetuating this big lie about Donald Trump and the 2020 election. He organized this three-day cyber symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota this summer. He invited some state legislators and invited what he called experts on hacking and elections. He claimed ... he was going to present indisputable proof that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump by foreign-associated hackers.

This thing, which was bizarre and conspiracy-ridden from the beginning even by its own standards, collapsed in kind of an embarrassing fashion as even the experts that Mike Lindell invited said that the alleged evidence was total nonsense. It was gibberish.

And three state lawmakers from Washington, who are vocal supporters of former President Trump, attended. Who are they?

They are state representatives Robert Sutherland of Granite Falls, Vicki Kraft from Vancouver, and Brad Klippert from Kennewick. They were among the dozens and dozens of legislators from across the country who did go to this event. These are typically people who already had a belief that the election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump.

You also report in the story that Washington state taxpayers footed the bill for this conference, for their travel and hotel expenses. Can you explain how that works, and how those expenses were approved?

As it was explained to me, each house member has an allowance of about $9,000 for travel per year. They generally have to get trips signed off on by the nonpartisan chief clerk's office. They send an email saying I want to go to this conference and here's why. Each of them said, basically, the information they got there was going to help them develop election-related legislation. The clerk's office basically accepted that and said, "Yeah, it's OK."

You reached out to each of these three lawmakers about their attending this conference and the use of the $4,300 or so of taxpayer money that they used to get there. What did they tell you?

They pointed out, accurately, that it had been approved by the State House. So there's no rules violation here, but it certainly was a strange event to go to. They said, from their perspective, they have a lot of constituents in their districts reaching out to them and saying, "we think there's something wrong with these 2020 election results and we support you looking into it." In some cases, they got messages from constituents thanking them for going to this event. They said, therefore, there's nothing really wrong with them going. That was their reasoning.

As you and others have reported, perpetuating this big lie about the 2020 election has now become this kind of litmus test for many Republican candidates running for office around the country. How are you seeing that play out here in Washington state?

In Washington, we don't get as many headlines about this, certainly not national headlines, because we have not been a swing state. We're not a state like some of these others where the election was closely contested, and where Republican-led legislatures are now instituting laws to try to maybe make it easier to overturn election results in the future. But, the through-line and the thread do exist here, as evidenced by these lawmakers going to this conference. A number of state and county Republican Party organizations have created election integrity task forces, including some that have cited as source material people like Sidney Powell and others whose theories about the election have been discredited and who are being sued over it.

Some of these lawmakers have, in the past, introduced legislation in Olympia to reshape our election system. In their view, when Vicki Kraft went to the cyber symposium, she complained about Washington's mail voting system and said we've been doing this fraudulent mail voting system for a long time. Some of them, particularly Representative Klippert, have introduced legislation to try to change the election system here back to going to polling places — only having absentee ballots on rare occasions, not allowing college students to print out ballots at campus if they lose theirs, for example — generally trying to basically roll back the all-mail voting system here.

And two of those lawmakers who went to the conference this past summer are now running for Congress.

Yes, Vicki Kraft is running against Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, and Brad Klippert is running against Representative Dan Newhouse. Both of those incumbents were notably among the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. So, not only would I say that the big lie theory is uniting big elements of the Republican Party, although not all, but also it goes hand-in-hand with loyalty to Trump and efforts to punish any politician that is viewed as insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.

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