Tag: arizona

Ruling: Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema Can Be Sued Under ‘Homewrecker” Law for Affair with Her Married Body Guard

A federal judge has ruled former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) is eligible to be sued under what is commonly known as North Carolina’s “homewrecker law” for her romantic relationship with a married member of her security detail.

Sinema has admitted to the affair with Matthew Ammel in 2024, but her civil defense lawyers argued she cannot be sued in North Carolina because she has no ties to the state.

U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon disagreed, on Friday denying the former lawmakers request to dismiss the civil complaint brought by the security guard’s ex-wife, Heather Ammel.

Matthew Ammel received nine messages from Sinema while he was at his North Carolina home, an act which the judge determined gives the state jurisdiction over the case.

“These messages, considered together, show Ms. Sinema building and furthering a romantic relationship with Mr. Ammel—invading the marriage not just while he was away on trips with her but while he was home with his family in North Carolina,” the judge wrote in his order.

The lawsuit alleged that besides the affair Sinema apparently attempted to treat Ammel’s PTSD from his army service in the Middle East with a powerful psychedelic drug.

According to a Hill report not long after the suit was filed in late 2025:

The complaint is full of bombshell claims, including that Sinema asked her security employee, Matthew Ammel, to bring MDMA on a work trip so that she could guide him through a psychedelic experience and that she messaged him about sexual positions in certain scenarios.

MDMA, also known as ecstasy or molly, is a recreational drug that enhances sensory experience. In recent years, it has been used in therapy settings, but the Food and Drug Administration last year declined to approve it as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hallucinogenic treatments have shown potential as a treatment for trauma and depression in recent studies. However,  treatments are typically administered in controlled clinical settings by licensed physicians and therapists.

Sinema has a master’s degree in social work and later became an attorney and law professor at Arizona State University. A former Democrat who registered as an independent in 2022, she served as a U.S. senator from 2019 until 2025.

North Carolina is one of a handful of states where people can sue for “alienation of affection,” the various news outlets reported Saturday.

The Ammels had “a good and loving marriage” with “genuine love and affection” before Sinema interfered, pursuing the husband despite knowing he was married, the wife alleged in her lawsuit.

The civil complaint can now go forward as plaintiff Heather Ammel seeks at least $75,000 in financial damages from the former lawmaker.

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Arizona Lawmakers Demand Further Review of Katie Hobbs Bribery Scheme After Far-Left AG Declines to Prosecute – Hobbs Responds

Arizona Republican lawmakers are calling for a real investigation into Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs after Attorney General Kris Mayes, a fellow Democrat, declined to bring charges for a potential pay-for-play scheme involving Hobbs and the Democratic Party. 

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Hobbs came under investigation in 2024, stemming from significant donations to the Democratic Party and a dark-money group used for Hobbs’ inaugural events, potentially influencing state contract decisions. Hobbs and the Democrats took $400,000 from Sunshine Residential Homes, which potentially made millions in return.

However, as expected, Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes closed her two-year-long investigation and announced last month that her office would not charge comrade Hobbs, who wouldn’t even sit for an interview with investigators.

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Arizona Rancher Tells Trump That Dem Gov Katie Hobbs Wants to Evict Him From Family Land to Build Foreign Company’s Solar Energy Plant

An Arizona rancher told President Trump on Friday that Democratic Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs would have taken his land away and given it to a foreign renewable energy company if the Trump administration had not intervened. 

Casey Murph, a fifth-generation Arizona rancher who leases land from the state for his H-Y Cattle Company in Navajo County, said that Hobbs wants to take away his land for a Danish energy company, Ørsted, to develop.

According to American Stewarts of Liberty, Murph’s family has used the roughly 4,000 acres of land in Northern Arizona since the 1870s, decades before Arizona even became a state in 1912.

In 2022, Murph began receiving notices from the state that foreign developers wanted his land for a renewable-energy project. In 2025, Hobbs signed an executive order granting large-scale energy infrastructure manufacturers priority access to state lands and easing restrictions on the so-called green energy projects.

“Her task force created a map of all the state lands throughout the state and color-coded those lands according to solar favorability,” Murph previously said, noting that his land was designated as less suitable for agriculture than renewable energy.

During an executive order signing ceremony on Friday, Murph revealed to the President that Hobbs wants to kick him off his family’s land of over a century to build a solar energy plant.

“It’s been in my family for over 100 years. Katie Hobbs has offered those lands up to solar development companies,” Murph said.

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Maricopa County Announces $800K Pilot Program To Cover Past-Due Rents

Maricopa County taxpayers will pay up to two months of rent for those facing eviction for nonpayment.

Maricopa County has partnered with the city of Phoenix to launch a pilot program aimed at preventing evictions. The county allocated $800,000 from its fiscal year 2027 budget to pay for the pilot program, and the board of supervisors approved it in May.

Board Chair Kate Brophy McGee said the program was modeled after the Texas Eviction Diversion Program, a pandemic-era relief program established via emergency order by the Texas Supreme Court which ended in 2023. 

“For three straight years, Maricopa County Justice Courts have processed more than 80,000 eviction filings. That’s 80,000 individuals or families on the brink of homelessness each year, at a time when that population is already high,” said Chair Kate Brophy McGee, District 3. “This pilot, modeled after a successful program in Texas, aims to address our eviction crisis head-on with interventions that are sustainable and effective. They are a hand up, not a hand out.”

Eligible residents may receive as much as $3,000 to cover two months of rental arrears; those with rental arrears exceeding three months past due and those with rental arrears exceeding $3,000 don’t qualify. Should every program participant qualify for the maximum relief amount, approximately 265 individuals would receive rental assistance. 

Residents must reside in zip codes 85008, 85040, 85041, 85042; have citizenship or lawful permanent residency; have experienced a temporary emergency or financial setback; and can demonstrate ability to pay monthly rent moving forward. 

Proof of ability to pay rent in the future includes an individual’s last two pay stubs, employment verification letter, Social Security income verification letter, a job offer letter, “other income verification,” or self-attestation. 

The program also accepts on self-attestation from a resident to indicate financial hardship impacting their ability to make future rental payments. Verifiable evidence of the nature of the professed temporary hardship must be provided: terminated employment, reduced work hours, business closure, short-term illness or disability, medical bills, funeral expenses, car repairs, natural or manmade disaster, victimization by crime or domestic violence, or a self-attestation describing the temporary hardship. 

Further, the program requires property owner participation. Property owners must provide documentation of the rental agreement, a tenant ledger, and other forms to include a W9. 

“A key condition of receiving financial assistance includes the property owner agreeing that the amounts paid by the program fully satisfy the covered rental arrears and eligible charges,” stated the county press release. 

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SHOCK! Democrat Arizona AG Declines to Charge Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs in $400K Bribery Case

Arizona’s Democratic attorney general has declined to charge Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs over explosive allegations that a major state contractor poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democratic political coffers before receiving a lucrative 30 percent rate increase.

Far-left Attorney General Kris Mayes announced Friday that her office would bring no criminal charges against Hobbs over her administration’s dealings with Sunshine Residential Homes.

The numbers behind the investigation were eye-popping.

Sunshine donated $200,000 to the Arizona Democratic Party ahead of Hobbs’ disputed victory over Republican Kari Lake back in 2022.

It then contributed $100,000 to Hobbs’ inaugural fund and another $100,000 to the state Democratic Party in August 2023.

Company founder Simon Kottoor and his wife also donated a combined $10,000 to Hobbs’ gubernatorial campaigns.

At the time of the donations, Sunshine had been pressing the state for a substantial increase in the rate it was paid for each foster-care bed.

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Ninth Circuit En Banc Delivers Massive Election Integrity Victory: Arizona Can Now Enforce Voter Registration Cancellation and Felony Provisions After Left-Wing Groups Lose Standing Battle

The full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday vacated a lower court’s preliminary injunction and cleared the way for Arizona to enforce two key 2022 election integrity provisions that left-wing activist groups had blocked for years.

The en banc ruling in Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans v. Mayes hands a decisive defeat to the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, Voto Latino, and Priorities USA, the usual cast of Democrat-aligned voter registration outfits that sued to stop common-sense reforms aimed at preventing double voting and out-of-state voting schemes.

These groups claimed Arizona’s “Cancellation Provision” and “Felony Provision” somehow interfered with their “core” activities of registering and mobilizing voters. The full court wasn’t buying it.

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1260, passed in 2022, strengthened the state’s ability to keep voter rolls accurate:

  • The Cancellation Provision requires a county recorder to cancel a voter’s registration in that county once the recorder receives confirmation (or confirms credible information) that the person has registered to vote in another Arizona county. This is basic list maintenance to stop people from remaining registered — and potentially voting — in multiple counties.
  • The Felony Provision makes it a crime to knowingly provide a “mechanism for voting” to someone who is registered to vote in another state. The statute gives the example of forwarding an early ballot.

Left-wing groups sued, claiming these measures would force them to divert resources and chill their registration drives. A district court judge obliged them with a preliminary injunction. A three-judge panel later vacated that injunction, but the full court took the case en banc.

The majority opinion, written by Judge Anthony D. Johnstone, delivers a clear message rooted in the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine: organizations cannot manufacture Article III standing simply by spending money to oppose a law they dislike or by claiming their “mission” is frustrated.

Under Hippocratic Medicine, an organizational plaintiff must show the challenged law “directly affect[s] and interfere[s] with [its] core business activities.” Mere diversion of resources to educate people about a law or to advocate against it is not enough.

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More than 600,000 voter files ripped off Arizona site in 2020 by hacker, but DOJ didn’t prosecute

Arizona’s largest county suffered a significant breach of its election data in the days before the 2020 presidential election when a self-described hacker foiled security and obtained 633,000 voter registration files but the Biden Justice Department and local prosecutors declined to bring charges even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the White House.

The scraping of Maricopa County’s voter registration files was the most flagged security incident in a cyberintrusion log kept by U.S. spy agencies in the days around the Nov. 3, 2020 election, and it caused an extensive FBI investigation that led agents to a home in Fountain Hills, Ariz., the memos show.

The man the FBI confronted admitted he wrote a computer script to exploit the county voter systems security and scraped the files, which included 930 with “sensitive voter information like domestic violence victims, judges and law enforcement officers,” according to the FBI case files declassified and made public by President Donald Trump’s White House Government Transparency Task Force.

FBI Director Kash Patel sent a letter to that task force this week stating the bureau spent “significant resources” but could not get the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Arizona Attorney’s Office or the Pinal County, Arizona Attorney’s Office to bring charges despite an admission from the alleged hacker.

FBI_Letter.pdf

The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the alleged hacker on July 12, 2021, under the Biden Administration, according to the FBI. The newly released memos do not state when the other prosecutorial agencies made similar decisions not to bring charges,  but the full case was officially closed in 2023.  

Just one day before the Nov. 3 election, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office submitted a tip through the Arizona Counterterrorism Intelligence Center that there had been “an attempt to scrape voter registration information,” according to one FBI summary. 

FBI_Opening_Doc.pdf

According to that memo, an unidentified intruder gained access to voter registration data on the recorder’s website by using a “Powershell script” that exploited a weakness in security. More than 633,000 voter records were exfiltrated between Oct. 21, 2020, and Nov. 2, 2020, the memos state.

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From Burger King to the Governor’s Office – The Curious Rise of Katie Hobbs

SECTION 1 — THE COLD OPEN

Katie Hobbs says she wants the “Pay-to-Play” investigation over.

There is only one complication: according to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, the Governor still has not agreed to sit down and answer investigators’ questions.

The inquiry concerns a politically connected foster-care provider, substantial campaign-related contributions, and a state decision that sharply increased the amount paid to that company only, for housing foster children. Hobbs insists she did not influence the agency’s decision. Mayes says her investigators still have questions.

And Mayes — herself a Democrat — was not subtle:

“You cannot blow off the Attorney General’s Office. Full stop. No one can.”

Hobbs says she looks forward to the investigation’s conclusion. Mayes says the investigation will move forward — with or without the Governor’s cooperation.1

An elected official wanting an inquiry finished while declining to promise an interview may not prove wrongdoing.  But it does produce one irresistible question:

How did a political career that began behind a Burger King counter arrive at a moment when Arizona’s own Attorney General publicly warned the Governor that no one is above answering questions?

To understand that, we must follow the ladder — from its first rung to the Governor’s Office — and examine what climbed alongside Katie Hobbs ascent.

SECTION 2 — WE ARE GETTING AHEAD OF OURSELVES

Before the campaign contributions, state contracts, investigators, and uncomfortable questions, there was a Burger King counter in Tempe.².

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Katie Hobbs also worked at Pizza Hut while pursuing her education — a familiar American story of long hours, modest pay, and determination.² It is relatable, memorable, and politically nearly perfect.

The message writes itself: Hobbs understood working families because she had struggled, she knew low-wage workers because she had been one, and she understood vulnerable people because she later chose social work as her profession.³

None of that should be mocked. Honest work is honest work, whether performed behind a desk, inside a shelter, or beside a deep fryer.

But a working-class beginning does not explain a political ascent.

This is not a campaign biography. It is a documented examination of how Katie Hobbs rose, how she exercised power, and what the public record reveals along the way.

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Arizona, Nevada blast federal plan for Colorado River

Arizona and Nevada on Friday opposed a Colorado River usage reduction plan by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which could define the crucial waterway for 40 million people over the next decade.

The Colorado River Final Environmental Impact Statement by the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Department of Interior emphasized the federal government’s preference for negotiations to take place among states, but set in motion plans for the next decade of water conservation. The proposal, which was released Friday, included up to 3 million acre-feet in annual Lower Basin water usage reductions.

“Arizona recognizes the serious condition of the Colorado River, and we are prepared to be part of a responsible solution,” Arizona State Senate President Warren Petersen said in a statement sent to The Center Square. “What we will not accept is a federal plan that protects some states while placing a devastating and disproportionate burden on Arizona.”

Negotiations among Colorado River states have repeatedly failed to meet deadlines over the past year, leading at least four states, including Arizona, to build legal teams for potential litigation over the river’s water sharing. The Colorado River states are California, Nevada and Arizona in the Lower Basin and Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico in the Upper Basin.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources toed the line on potential legal action. The department told The Center Square in a statement that it would “work to complete the agreements necessary to implement the Lower Basin Proposal while preserving Arizona’s legal rights.”

“We appreciate the Trump Administration’s willingness to continue working with us toward a fair agreement, but the Senate stands ready to use every legal and legislative tool available if Arizona is forced to carry this burden alone,” Petersen said.

The previous Colorado River water usage guidelines from 2007 are set to expire at the end of 2026.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s new guidelines included “sideboards” to protect against extreme flow reductions in the river. The largest announcement among them was the potential annual 3 million acre-feet of water reductions that could be required from California, Nevada and Arizona.

The Colorado River Compact, originally signed in 1922, allocates each basin 7.5 million acre-feet of annual river water. Today, the agreement applies to seven states and 30 tribes.

“While our community is prepared to manage through short-term reductions to protect the Colorado River system, as the basin’s smallest water user, Nevada cannot solve the river’s imbalance alone,” John Entsminger, Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager, told The Center Square in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) released by the Department of the Interior today seeks to impose unrealistic reductions on Nevada and our water users,” Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, added in a statement Friday.

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Indian-origin Canadian trucker caught hiding millions in cocaine on cross-continent run

Bodycam footage from an Arizona state trooper on January 6, 2025, shows just how casually certain truck drivers engage in fraud and high-stakes smuggling.

It also shows how easily this kind of criminality rides alongside ordinary traffic on North American highways.

On Interstate 40 near Holbrook, a Volvo tractor-trailer drew a state trooper’s attention when its hazard lights began flashing, then leaving a turn signal flashing. When questioned, the Canadian driver claimed there was a switch problem and said he was heading to a Love’s mechanic — after already passing both a Love’s and a TA truck stop. The driver quickly pivoted his story, claiming he was heading to an “Indian mechanic,” when the trooper flagged his response as suspicious.

While examining the electronic logging device, the trooper quickly became aware of a concerning driving pattern.

There were multiple stretches of “unidentified drive time” appearing from Michigan through Ohio into New York, and again just before the stop.

The driver invented a co-driver named “Uncle” — someone who never logged in or out yet somehow erased hours when convenient. He claimed to be in the sleeper berth when the records showed he was driving. This is textbook hours-of-service fraud designed to push past the federal 11-hour driving limit.

What began as a traffic stop escalated when the trooper checked the sleeper berth. Tightly wrapped bricks of cocaine were found hidden underneath. More packages appeared on the opposite side. Officers then found kilo after kilo concealed throughout the produce load itself, turning out to be one of the larger commercial-truck seizures in recent memory.

The driver, 31-year-old Amarjeet Singh Matharu, had allegedly made the run multiple times before. For moving cocaine valued in the tens of millions of dollars range, he received just under three years in prison.

This bodycam footage finally offers a clear window into the kind of culture that has taken root in commercial trucking.

Ontario’s Auditor General reported in May that private career colleges routinely cut the required 103.5-hour Entry Level Training to as little as 59 or 81 hours, with some skipping emergency stops and left turns at major intersections altogether.

Unregistered schools were handing out certificates, dozens of colleges were never even inspected, and nearly 100 trucking companies with serious safety violations were still being approved to bring in temporary foreign workers; putting them behind the wheel of these increasingly deadly trucks.

“Driver Inc.” has become widely known as a model that misclassifies drivers as independent contractors, allowing companies to dodge overtime, proper wages, and hours-of-service rules. The result is financial pressure that keeps exhausted drivers on the road, compromising road safety at large.

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