Every Accusation a Confession

Austin Smith, former Arizona state representative and former of the political wing of Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, has pled guilty to election petition signature fraud.

Imagine that.  A voter fraud conspiracist engaging in voter fraud.

A former leader of the pro-Trump group Turning Point Action was sentenced on Tuesday to two years of probation and barred from running for office for five years for forging voters’ signatures on his petitions as part of his 2024 bid for re-election to the Arizona House.

The former state legislator, Austin Smith, pleaded guilty in November to two criminal counts and admitted that he had submitted fraudulent signatures to state election officials, including the name of a woman who had died.

The outcome was a striking twist for Mr. Smith, 30, a Republican who represented the Phoenix suburbs for one term and had repeatedly sought to sow doubt about the Arizona results in the 2020 election, when President Trump lost his re-election bid.

………

While trying to qualify for the Republican primary to run for re-election, Mr. Smith was accused in a court complaint in April 2024 of forging dozens of signatures on his nominating petitions. The complaint was filed by one of his constituents, James Ashurst, a Democrat, who said the signatures resembled Mr. Smith’s handwriting.

Three days after being named in the complaint, Mr. Smith resigned from his post as a senior director for Turning Point Action, the political arm of Turning Point USA, the grass-roots group founded by Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was assassinated last September. Mr. Smith also abandoned his bid for re-election, but denied any wrongdoing at the time.

Probation and a fine is all he got.  It's not enough.