Inslee says ‘stop the steal’ election lies from WA lawmakers should be a crime

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Thursday that he wants lawmakers to pass legislation making it a gross misdemeanor for elected officials and candidates to spread lies about election results.

If the law were to pass, a Tri-Cities lawmaker could be one of the first to be targeted.

State Rep. Brad Klippert, R-Kennewick, was criticized again recently for continuing to spread debunked conspiracy theories and insist the 2020 election was stolen.

The Seattle Times reported that the Democratic governor spoke forcefully against what he called “a continuing coup” on the one-year anniversary of both the Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C., and a protest where demonstrators breached the gate of the governor’s residence in Olympia.

Former President Donald Trump, Inslee said, “is still intent on continuing this coup effort.”

“And we have to realize, unfortunately, it’s not just in other states; it is right here in Washington state, this ongoing effort,” Inslee said at The Associated Press Legislative Preview.

Inslee, who handily defeated Republican candidate Loren Culp in the 2020 election, cited three Republican state lawmakers who used taxpayer dollars to attend a symposium on election fraud last summer that trafficked in debunked conspiracy theories.

Klippert, a Benton County Sheriff’s deputy and a colonel in the Washington State Guard, was one of them.

Held by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the event in South Dakota revealed no such evidence of fraud in the November 2020 election, and even some of the experts Lindell had invited said the hacking data that he discussed was nonsensical.

Klippert not only attended the Lindell-hosted conference, but also spoke at it.

Inslee said the proposed legislation is still being drafted, and he’s working to find sponsors for the bill to make such lies a gross misdemeanor.

“It should not be legal in the state of Washington for elected officials or candidates for office to willfully lie about these election results,” Inslee said.

He later told The Seattle Times that for the gross misdemeanor to kick in, there would have to be “knowledge that there’s potential to create violence.”

For that reason, Inslee said he believes it’s constitutional and won’t run afoul of prior state Supreme Court rulings.

In a narrow 5-4 decision in 2007, the court struck down a law barring candidates from deliberately making false statements about their opponents, ruling it violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. That ruling came in a case of a candidate who was fined $1,000 by the state Public Disclosure Commission for false claims about a state senator the candidate was challenging.

Inslee’s proposal drew criticism from state Rep. Drew Stokesbary, R-Auburn.

“You combat bad speech with better speech, not criminal sanctions. Threatening to jail people for political speech is as dangerous to our democracy as questioning election results,” he wrote on Twitter.

Rep. Klippert

Klippert told the Tri-City Herald this week that he still believes the election was stolen. And in a response defending his use of taxpayer funds, Klippert repeated long-debunked conspiracy theories.

“I do (believe the election was stolen), 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.”

His claims have been repeatedly refuted by election officials at both the local and state levels, including by Washington state’s Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman and the GOP auditors in Benton and Franklin counties.

On Wednesday, Maricopa County officials once again debunked the faulty audit by Cyber Ninjas. Officials said that only 37 ballots were found to actually be questionable, out of the nearly 54,000 ballots the firm tried to claim were illegal.

Maricopa County election director Scott Jarrett told Arizona lawmakers that nearly every claim made by firm was misleading, inaccurate or false.

Klippert told the Herald that he intends to file another bill calling for a forensic audit of the 2020 Presidential election in Washington state. He filed a similar bill last spring, which failed to make it out of committee.

This story was originally published January 7, 2022 at 5:00 AM.