Introduction to a grift (aka #LecternGate)
Sarah Huckabee Sanders bought a podium last year. Now she is in hot water. A long-delayed legislative report on her shady purchase of an overpriced piece of furniture will drop next week. Odds favor the report exposing the Arkansas Governor as a high-ranking, garden-variety grifter — who funneled state funds to her friends so they could all enjoy a knees-up in Paris.
The details are covered in the section “The Grift” below
The Arkansas AG’s letter
To blunt the anticipated fallout from her promiscuous use of the citizens' money to enrich her mates, Sanders asked the Arkansas Attorney General, Tim Griffin, to weigh in on the legality of her actions. Her fellow MAGA obliged. He looked at the state laws covering purchases by the Governor. In a letter to Sanders concluded that the Governor was a ‘constitutional officer’ not covered by the rules that cover state ‘agencies.’ He assured Sanders that she was in no legal peril.
Is he right? I have no idea. His letter was replete with case citations, authoritative opinions, and precedents. Legal opinions range from the water-tight to the baffle them with bullshit strategies favored by criminals and their apologists. Griffin’s letter seems of the bullshit variety — and it focuses solely on whether the law applied to Sanders. That is a conservative SOP. MAGA shysters will beat one point to death, hoping people will forget about the subjects they did not address.
It is like a drunk driver who hits and kills a pedestrian. Then is arrested miles from the location of the event. And tells the cop they were not speeding before the accident. That might be true. But it is not a defense to DUI or fleeing the scene of a fatal accident.
Griffin’s letter is a work of art. The formatting is good. It has the requisite footnotes, citations, and hair-splitting word analysis that legal excuses demand. It purports to check the boxes Sanders needed checked. It will be up to independent legal authorities — if such things exist in Arkansas — to decide if Griffin has legal merit for his conclusion.
The good news is that the report was commissioned by two Republican members of the state legislature, who may well have issues with the imperious Sanders. And are thus motivated to prevent Sander’s malfeasance from being swept away.
Regardless, Griffin’s letter never claims Sanders did not do what she did. It merely says her actions — no matter how reprehensible — were not illegal. This is a standard MAGA out. Trump’s defense does not challenge the facts. It does not deny his anti-democratic excesses or that he took documents from the White House. His stay-out-of-jail claim is that the laws on classified documents and presidential immunity did not make it legal for him to do what he did.
Let us look at how Sanders got herself into this jam.
The grift
In June 2023, Governor Sanders’ office used a state-issued credit card to buy a lectern. An invoice showed that the state paid $19,029.25 for a Custom Falcon Podium, the accompanying road case, and a 3% credit card processing fee.
The vendor was Beckett Events LLC, a boutique event management company based in Virginia — which was conspicuously not in the lectern-selling business. That company is owned by Virginia Beckett and Hannah Stone. Sanders' office previously hired the pair to help plan her gubernatorial inauguration and her subsequent response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address.
Sanders and the two women have more than a professional relationship. When Sanders took a state-paid junket to France to attend the Paris Air Show, days after her office paid for the lectern, she and the two women wined and dined in the City of Lights. This bacchanal raises the question — did the taxpayers of Arkansas pay for this moveable feast?
Sanders must have assumed this lectern purchase would disappear in the shuffle. But she did not reckon on the indefatigable muck-raking of Arkansas attorney Matt Campbell. Last June, the founder of the progressive blog "Blue Hog Report," requested public records related to Sanders' travel and security after she went to the Paris Air Show.
Campbell claims the records he received were incomplete. Showing more consciousness of guilt, Sanders implored the state legislature to tighten up Arkansas’ Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to restrict access to the Governor’s records. They obliged.
However, Campbell secured a copy of the paid invoice that now had an undated annotation “to be reimbursed.” The state GOP then did what it could to exonerate Sanders and forked over the cash. Sanders may think that as the state was made whole, she is innocent under the “no harm, no foul” rule (a defense regularly used by Trump).
Adding to the absurdity, Sanders' spokesperson Alexa Henning said using a state credit card for the purchase was "an accounting error."
God, these people are stupid. If you rob a bank, you are still guilty of a crime even if you say you did not mean to and return the money when the police show up.
Sanders further compounded her jeopardy by overpaying for the podium — estimates for the excess run from $11,000 to $18,000. She also gave Beckett Events an amount just under the $20,000 limit that requires Governors to get additional approvals. But most damning, no one has seen the lectern — only a photograph of it, with no information where that picture was taken.
Did Sanders send $19,029.25 of taxpayer money to a friend for nothing?
Sanders reaction
Sanders has done a quality impression of an evasive kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She and her staff have tried the usual misdirection and finger-pointing to muddy the waters.
Faced with the reality that the legislature was doing an audit, Henning pretended Sanders was thrilled that it would expose a vile Democrat plot. Arkansas’ “left-wing activists” can only dream of having that sort of clout.
"The governor … encourages legislators to complete it without delay. This is nothing more than a manufactured controversy by left wing activists to distract from the bold conservative reforms the legislature has passed and the governor has signed into law and is effectively implementing in Arkansas."
Arkansas ranks so low on all significant health, wealth, and education lists that any bold reform would be a boon to the benighted state. But Sanders’ one significant piece of legislation — beyond shielding herself with a more restrictive FOI law — is an “anti-woke” act that bans the state from using certain words.
Sanders herself has also piled on. In October 2023, she sniffed,
“This was paid for by private funds. People want to manufacture a controversy where there isn’t one, but this is something the state has been reimbursed for. And, I think there are some people who are always going to be angry and always looking to complain about, and this is what they are picking right now.”
The end
Sanders, as the daughter of a former Governor and nationally prominent for her role as Trump’s presidential press person, probably thought that, as a Republican in a ruby-red state, she was bullet-proof. She may also be too dumb to realize that the internet has enabled citizen journalists to do the job the both-sider mainstream media has given up on.
And, in a time when local newspapers are folding, muck-raking individuals still exist, ready to hold the powerful to account.
I do not know if LecternGate will topple Sanders. Not that it would make much difference. The MAGA Hydra is not yet short of heads. However, unless the report is a complete whitewash, it should thwart this miserable person's national aspirations. That pleasing outcome would be one small step to making America great again.