Taxpayers paid for Tri-Cities lawmaker’s trip to controversial ‘stop the steal’ conference

A state lawmaker from the Tri-Cities said he was justified in being reimbursed for attending a “Cyber Symposium” hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell last August.

State Rep. Brad Klippert, R-Kennewick, said attending the conference, which was widely criticized for promoting debunked conspiracy theories, was done in service of voters.

Washington state taxpayers paid $4,361 for the hotels and flights for Klippert and two other state legislators, according to documents obtained by the Seattle Times.

“I went there in (the interest of constituents) on a fact finding mission. I am doing everything I can because I don’t have the resources myself as a part-time state level legislator .... to do the study myself,” Klippert told the Tri-City Herald.

“While there I was able to coordinate with other legislators from all across the nation about what took place in their states. It was a very profitable fact finding mission I went on as a representative from Washington state,” he said.

The conference

Klippert said his primary goal as an attendee was to learn more about cyber-security and election vulnerabilities.

“The fact that Mike Lindell was there to sponsor, that was not superfluous, but I still would have gone if Mike Lindell was not there,” he said.

Lindell convened the three-day “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota, promising to provide “irrefutable” evidence the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump by hackers. Lindell is currently involved in multiple lawsuits brought by voting machine companies.

The three-day, livestreamed event, rife with debunked conspiracy theories, produced no such proof and ended in embarrassing fashion when even some of Lindell’s own invited experts said hacking data he’d touted was nonsensical.

“It was a cyber security symposium, and I think it’s correct in saying it has to do with election security. I think there are a whole lot of people in the United States who think there was fraud that took place in the 2020 elections,” Klippert said. “Citizens deserve to have a system they can have confidence in. That’s why I thought It was relevant to be there.”

Klippert said he believes the 2020 election was stolen, and voting systems are still vulnerable.

“I do, I think, one of the things I’ve learned in my studies, and at that cyber-security symposium, is that with our smart phones, our smart doorbells, our smart washing machines, you can hack into just about anything,” Klippert said.

“You and I both know, as we watched the news on various channels, if you happened to take a look at Maricopa County, all of the fraudulent activity with their audits, I firmly believe that similar activity took place in multiple areas, including Washington state.”

The Arizona Republic’s Editorial Board recently slammed the audit as a farce, and an embarrassment to the state. The results of the audit did in fact confirm that Biden won the state, contrary to claims otherwise, according to a report by the auditing firm Cyber Ninjas.

His claims have been refuted by election officials at both the local and state levels, including Washington state’s Republican Secretary of State.

Benton County Auditor Brenda Chilton and Franklin County Auditor Matt Beaton, both Republicans, said last year that elections in our counties were secure.

Secretary of State Kim Wyman, also a Republican, has been a champion for the state’s voting system as more states looked at switching to voting by mail. She spoke at a Washington State University Foley Institute presentation last February about security measures in place to protect state elections saying that Washington state does a good job balancing access and security, while maintaining the integrity of the way data is managed, in terms of both physical copies and cybersecurity,

On hand at the symposium in Sioux Falls were dozens of state legislators from around the country, who have parroted Trump and Lindell’s false fraud narrative, demanding audits of the long-settled election.

Klippert said he took “pages and pages of notes” and coordinated with election officials from other areas to learn more about what they believe happened in their jurisdiction.

Among the elected officials were three Republicans from Washington, whose trips to the Lindell event were paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Public records released to The Seattle Times last week show state Reps. Robert Sutherland, R-Granite Falls, Vicki Kraft, R-Vancouver, and Klippert, requested and received expense reimbursements from the Legislature for the symposium.

Legislative priorities

With a new legislative session beginning on Jan. 10, Klippert said he intends to file legislation to call for a full forensic audit of the 2020 presidential election in Washington state, and changes to election security.

Klippert said he believes there is ample cause to suspect there was voter fraud, and that he wants to see the responsible parties held accountable. Klippert told the Herald in March that he wants to see voting by mail ended in the state.

His attempt to roll back the clock on Washington voting laws, House Bill 1377, failed to make it out of committee in 2021 legislative session.

Klippert is not vaccinated, and said he therefore will not be allowed on the state House floor. He is a longtime Benton County Sheriff’s deputy, and received criticism last year he was still working on campuses as a school resource officer despite being unvaccinated.

He will be able to participate from his office via teleconference, but his legislative assistant will not be allowed to be in the office with him. He is unsure whether he will be making the trip to Olympia or participate strictly through teleconference.

He said he has been consulting with the Capitol to determine where the best place for him to be is.

Klippert is not a fan of using applications such as Zoom to conduct the legislature’s business, and said he intends to also file legislation to challenge enforcement of mask and vaccine mandates, as well as challenge the state’s attempt to bar unvaccinated or unmasked members from the house floor.

He believes these measures are counter intuitive to the intentions of the framers of both the state and federal constitutions.

“One of the things that a lot of citizens are really truly tired of is all of the mandates. The vaccination mandates, the mask mandates, testing mandates,” Klippert said. “I’m working on legislation to say the government cannot mandate that.”

He intends to take aim at recent changes to COVID-19 testing requirements for high school and college athletes at indoor events, after a massive COVID-19 event linked to wrestling tournaments in December. He said that precedent about vaccination mandates should not apply to COVID because it is less deadly than past public health crises, such as polio.

Other legislative priorities for Klippert include walking back recent public safety changes, and cracking down on open borders, drug trafficking and homelessness.

“Homelessness and our drug overdose rates are through the roof,” Klippert said. “For homelessness, here’s an example as a law enforcement officer for the last 28 years: on multiple occasions, say for instance in the judiciary committee, a lady testified on Zoom whose husband was in prison. She said being in prison would be one of the last things her husband would want to happen in anyone’s life, but that her husband would also tell you that going to prison saved his life.”

Klippert said tackling drug and homelessness issues also means changing laws that discourage law enforcement from arresting people struggling with homelessness.

“That involves enforcing the laws that we used to have. Some people think that’s cruel,” he said. “I don’t think that’s cruel at all, it saves people’s lives. Here are people that live on the streets in 17 degree temperatures, who now have a place to live, three hot meals and they’re getting clean.”

Klippert acknowledged that the state would still need to provide support for people to prepare them as they reentered society to ensure they did not reoffend or fall back into substance abuse.

Bills and committees

Klippert is the Assistant Ranking Minority Member on the Public Safety Committee and also sits on the Children, Youth and Families and Civil Rights and Judiciary committees.

He has prefiled several bills, which cover topics such as reducing property taxes for gold star families, creating a domestic violence offender registry, prohibiting abortions from being performed by means of medication and “recognizing the lasting immune protection resulting from recovery from COVID-19.”

The latter would require the state to treat those who have had a COVID-19 infection as if they were vaccinated. It is unclear in the bill filed how that determination would be made.

The 2022 legislative session begins on Jan. 10. Residents can participate in the process by contacting their representatives, testifying in virtual hearings or by submitting written testimony.

This story was originally published January 3, 2022 at 12:59 PM.