A senior Republican from Maricopa County, Arizona, said earlier this year that she would “lynch” one of the county’s top election officials if he entered the room.
At a March event for a Republican congressional candidate, Shelby Busch, the first vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, spoke of the importance of finding “unity” with “good, Christian” people before serving as the county recorder Stephen Richer mentioned.
Richer is the elected official responsible for overseeing elections in the county along with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. He has become a target for Republicans in Arizona because, despite being a Republican himself, he has done just that stood up for the integrity of the elections And shot down unfounded conspiracy theories about widespread fraud. (He is also up for re-election this year.)
“Let’s pretend that this gentleman here was running for county recorder, and that he’s a good Christian man who believes what we believe. We can work with that, right? That’s unity,” Busch said, pointing to someone in the crowd. “That means, ‘Hey, we’re going to shake hands and we’re going to agree that we’re going to run a good, Christian foundation campaign, and we’re going to treat each other well, and we’re going to treat each other well.’ We’re going to get through this together, right?’ That is unity.”
She continued, “But if Stephen Richer walked into this room, I would lynch him. I do not associate myself with people who do not believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country. And so I want to make that clear as we talk about what it means to unite.”
“If Stephen Richer walked into this room, I would lynch him.”
This is Shelby Busch.
She is second in command of the Maricopa County Republican Committee (@MaricopaGOP). She was the provincial party’s ‘volunteer of the year’ in 2023. She is an advisor to Kari Lake and others.
She also… pic.twitter.com/L7lWTm3oSk
— Stephen Richer—MaricopaCountyRecorder (prsnl acct) (@stephen_richer) June 24, 2024
Richer posted a clip of Busch’s March 20 comments to X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, saying in another message that the clip was “just shared with me this weekend.”
Busch denied that her comments about religion were related to Richer’s Jewish faith and said her comment about lynching was made “in jest.”
“Everyone knows I don’t like richer,” Busch wrote in an email to HuffPost on Tuesday. “The statement was a joke and said in jest. I do not and would never condone violence against anyone. This was a small event from a few months ago. These comments had nothing to do with his Jewish faith. I didn’t even know he was Jewish.”
In a longer video from that same campaign event, Busch tells the crowd, “The word ‘unity’ makes my skin crawl” because “there is a lot of terrestrial, fake and despicable ‘unity talk’ going around our state.”
She added, “What does unity mean to me? It means uniting with those who share the core Biblical, Christian Jewish principles that we share. I think it was Paul who told us that we should not associate ourselves with the swindlers, and the adulterers, and the filth, and bring it into our world, and therefore we should be careful when we talk about unity, and make sure that we really understand what that means.”
At the time, Busch praised Don Hiatt, a Republican running against Richer for the party’s county recorder nomination, who was in the room. She said he was “a good, Christian man, and he believes in what we believe in” before continuing to attack Richer.
Neither the Maricopa County Republican Committee nor the Republican Party of Arizona immediately responded to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
Busch is also chairman of We The People AZ Alliance, a right-wing election conspiracy theory group that has received funding from ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne’s group, The America Project, as Issue One and AZ Mirror have reported.
