A Republican official from a key Arizona county said Monday that he had rejected calls from President Donald Trump’s White House in the weeks following the 2020 election because he believed “whatever needed to be said, needed to be said in a courtroom.”
The calls made by individuals in Trump’s White House to Clint Hickman, then-chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, appeared to be part of a pressure campaign led by Trump’s then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward to convince members of the elected body that supervises elections in the county to announce that there had been voting irregularities in their county, as litigation related to the election continued in the state, according to records published last week by The Arizona Republic.
“I got a phone call from the White House switchboard, and I have to say it: All of these people that called me, it wasn’t stonewalling. We were in litigation at all these points. … Whatever needed to be said, needed to be said in a courtroom in front of a judge or a jury,” Hickman told CNN’s Michael Smerconish on “Cuomo Prime Time,” referring to a number of election-related lawsuits that were pending at the time of the White House calls.