Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) donated a whopping $100 to the campaign of the Arizona Democrat running for reelection against controversial ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
In a tweet on Wednesday, Flake posted a picture of a check he’d made out to Maricopa County’s current Sheriff Paul Penzone’s campaign, specifying “County Over Party” in the memo line of the check. Penzone, a Democrat, defeated Arpaio for county sheriff in 2016, not long before Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop racially profiling people and detaining them because he suspected they were undocumented.
https://t.co/eWPPcBvPqP pic.twitter.com/636q6PeEOZ
— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) September 4, 2019
Arpaio made an unsuccessful bid for Congress last year, when he came in third in the Republican primary race for Flake’s Senate seat. The move is hardly surprising coming from Flake, who spent the better part of his last year in Congress calling out President Trump during impassioned Senate floor speeches and media appearance promoting his new book. But Flake failed to fully curry favor with the other side of the aisle. He was widely criticized for voting to approve the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after stalling a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation to allow for an FBI investigation into allegations of sexual assault.
Arpaio announced he would challenge Penzone’s reelection early last week, on the two-year anniversary of President Trump’s decision to pardon him of his crime. The move was widely considered payback for Arpaio full-throated embrace of the President during his 2016 campaign.
Penzone did not immediately return TPM’s request for comment.
