Guests - Dave Smith, Alex Kolodin, Tom Horne
Bolton Pleads Guilty, the Big Beautiful Bill Heads to the Senate, and the Lawsuit That Needed to Be Named
Thursday on Winn Tucson opened with justice being served on a man who published his own evidence and closed with a Polish-Jewish father whose love of history saved his family from the Holocaust. In between: a detailed accounting of the internecine Republican fight that is consuming time and resources during a critical election cycle, a secretary of state candidate with fresh data on Fontes's latest lies and protected voter data breach, and a Superintendent of Public Instruction who has a personal reason to believe history education is not optional.
Dave Smith: Bolton Pleads, the Big Beautiful Bill, Iowa, and the Internal War Nobody Has Time For
Dave Smith — retired law enforcement, former chairman of the Pima County Republican Party, and the man Betsy Brantner Smith sent into the world for this conversation — joined the morning with a crisp summary of the national news and a longer, more painful account of the internal party fight that he is still being dragged through, months after leaving the chairmanship.
John Bolton: When the Evidence Is in the Book
The morning opened on John Bolton's announced guilty plea — a single count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents — and a $2 million fine. He had been indicted on 18 counts.
"When your book is your prima facie evidence against you, you're in real trouble."
The arrogance was the telling element — not just that Bolton mishandled classified material, but that he published it, collected royalties on it, and apparently believed the combination of political connections and institutional prestige would insulate him from consequences.
"You knew he did what he did and he thought he could get away with it. That's what always blows my mind."
The Big Beautiful Bill: What's Still in Play
The One Big Beautiful Bill — which passed the House with provisions including no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, the Trump Accounts for children, and historic conformity measures for Arizona and other states — is now in the Senate. Dave and Winn agreed that much of what happens next depends on whether conservatives hold the line in November.
If Republicans lose even one chamber in the midterms, Biden-era regulatory and prosecutorial frameworks come back. The IRS gets refunded. The deportation machinery stalls. Every accountability measure undertaken in the first two years gets buried in committee. This is not hypothetical — it is the stated plan of the opposition.
Iowa, California, and the Races That Matter
Dave had spent the week in Iowa, where Ashley Hinson won the Republican Senate primary 74 percent to 26 — a 3-to-1 blowout that was nonetheless accompanied by a relentless media narrative about Democratic chances in the state.
"There's no way they're flipping Iowa. You drive in those farmlands and there's nobody there who's got a Democrat sign up."
The propaganda function is not to persuade Iowa voters — it's to demoralize Republican donors and volunteers elsewhere by suggesting that even safe states are in play. Dave named it clearly: this is media lying to change reality rather than report it.
In California, Republicans are projecting House pickups in three congressional seats — San Francisco, San Diego, and one other — in districts the Democrats had gerrymandered specifically to prevent such outcomes. The jungle primary structure had created openings the party's own map-makers hadn't anticipated.
Arizona is the next target. Dave was unambiguous: money is coming. The governor's race, the secretary of state, the attorney general, nine congressional seats including Ciscomani's and David Schweikert's — the full suite of Arizona competitive races will attract national Democratic money at a scale the state hasn't seen before.
The Internal Party Fight: Two Separate Bodies, One Unnecessary Lawsuit
The segment that lasted longest and dug deepest was not about the national elections. It was about a lawsuit that Dave Smith, as former Pima County GOP chairman, has been dealing with since before he took the job.
The origin: Arizona's 2022 redistricting created a structural anomaly. Precinct committeemen in Sahuarita and Green Valley — some of the most active PCs in the state, Winn noted repeatedly — were assigned to Legislative District 19, which spans five counties. The plurality of LD-19's PCs live outside Pima County, which meant that under the bylaws, those Pima County PCs who had been reorganized into LD-19 had no voice in Pima County's own party business.
The fix was straightforward: pass a bylaw amendment allowing those PCs to select a representative to sit on the Pima County Republican Party executive committee, representing Pima County business only. This had nothing to do with LD-19's own organization. It was Pima County taking care of Pima County's people.
"We gave them that and they chose their representative. LD-19 wants to interfere, saying: you're creating a separate committee. We're not creating a separate committee."
Former LD-19 chair Ray Ely sued, and the lawsuit was transferred to Smith's name when he was elected chairman. The original lawsuit — filed by Shelly Keis against the same structure — had already established what the court would eventually confirm: the court has no jurisdiction over internal party organizational matters.
"The court has no authority in this matter. The judge wrote a very comprehensive reason why he couldn't take it."
The judge's ruling came down May 26th. The lawsuit was dismissed. The LD-19 side is now attempting to substitute Joanne Gasper — the widow of Louis Gasper, the former LD-19 chair who died of stage four cancer while the case was pending — as the new plaintiff in an appeal.
"They used a dying man to fight their battles. There's no courage there. There's no intelligence there. There's no grace."
Dave's inventory of the other side's record was unsparing: one of the principals gave $10,000 to Hillary Clinton before trying to run the Pima County party. Another is alleged to have stolen $80,000. The defamation campaign against him personally has continued even though he is no longer the chairman.
"And the defamation becomes ridiculous. I was essentially defamed by Ray Ely. You know, when your credibility is at his level, it doesn't hurt me. But it is frustrating."
The thing that most frustrated both Smith and Winn was simpler than any legal argument: the timing.
"We are in a midterm election with so much at stake. And the fact that these people have nothing better to do than this — fighting about who gets on the Pima County executive committee — has just become ridiculous."
Dave's message was measured, specific, and final: the court has ruled. The law is on the side of the current Pima County GOP structure. The appeals process is expensive and will produce the same outcome. If they want to continue, the party will document everything they're doing and let voters draw their own conclusions.
"I'm not going to engage in it. But they will not like the outcome. The law is on our side."
The straightforward summary: a bylaw was passed to activate the participation of the best precinct committeemen in Pima County who had been reorganized out of having a voice. The court said that was fine. The opposition continues to fight it. The election doesn't care who wins this particular power struggle — it cares whether Republicans show up in sufficient numbers to flip the offices that matter.
"Let's focus on winning."
Alex Kolodin: Fontes Leaked Protected Voter Data, Lied About His Budget, and His Opponent Is Defending Him
Alex Kolodin — LD-3 state representative and candidate for Arizona Secretary of State — called in from his car while driving to Oro Valley to speak with Republican women, and delivered three separate revelations about Adrian Fontes's tenure that, taken together, constitute an indictment of the office under its current occupant.
Fontes Released Protected Voter Data
The Arizona Address Confidentiality Program — ACP — is a statute that protects the home addresses of voters who have a documented safety reason for confidentiality: domestic violence survivors, law enforcement officers, judges, witnesses in criminal proceedings. Their address is shielded from the public voter roll precisely because disclosure could endanger their lives.
Adrian Fontes released the protected data of nearly 80 ACP-enrolled voters while using the state voter database to generate early ballot reports.
The legal status of this failure is unambiguous. The secretary of state's statutory duty is to keep those addresses confidential. Fontes failed at that duty.
"Depending on his level of culpability in that failure, he might have committed a criminal act in doing so. Not that Chris Mays is ever going to prosecute it."
Kolodin added the irony that undercuts any argument about the ACP program being too large or too broadly administered: having the program and then releasing the data is demonstrably worse for the protected individuals than having no program at all.
"If you have an expectation based on the law that your data is going to be protected, it's far more dangerous for you to falsely have that expectation and then have Adrian Fontes release your data without you knowing."
The additional detail that tightened the political picture: Governor Hobbs — while she was secretary of state — made a nearly identical error in 2020, releasing records of approximately 80 protected voters while generating early ballot reports. The Hobbs-Fontes administration has been, in Kolodin's phrase, "sticking together in their record of failure."
What His Opponent Said About It
When Winn asked Kolodin what his primary opponent, Gina Sabota, said in response to the ACP breach, his answer was as illuminating as the original story.
Sabota's argument was that Kolodin had somehow cut Fontes's budget — which she framed as the cause of the data breach. This is the same line Fontes himself uses. Kolodin noted the obvious coordination signal: Fontes's elections director had been profusely thanking Sabota on Twitter, and Sabota had been going on television to express her admiration for Fontes.
"One might wonder about the level of her coordination with that office."
The additional irony: Kolodin voted against last year's budget, and his primary stated reason was that it gave Fontes too much money. He cannot take credit for cutting Fontes's budget — because he was in the minority on the vote. He was, if anything, the loudest voice against giving Fontes additional resources.
The Eight Million Dollar Lie
Last year's state budget included $7-8 million requested by Fontes to administer the CD-7 special congressional election. The request was enormous on its face — the secretary of state does not run elections. Counties do. The secretary of state provides oversight.
Budget staff have now reported back to the legislature that they were lied to.
"Come to find out, our budget staff has reported to me that they finally realized — oh wait, he lied to us when he asked for that money. He didn't need anywhere near that amount."
The practical consequence: Fontes has millions of unrestricted dollars sitting in his department's accounts, accumulated through overclaims on budget requests, which he is now using for purposes unrelated to the administration of elections.
"He doesn't use it to do his job. He uses it for partisan political ends. That's all he does."
Kolodin's position for the current budget negotiations: no unrestricted funds to Fontes. And whatever funding is necessary for election administration should go directly to the county-level officials who actually run elections, not to the secretary of state's office.
The Postal Service Executive Order: A Victory
A federal court denied the left's preliminary injunction against President Trump's executive order regarding the postal service and elections. Kolodin explained why this matters structurally:
Elections are largely a state matter. But the U.S. Postal Service is unambiguously federal. The executive branch has clear authority over how the postal service handles election materials. The denial of the injunction means that the Trump administration's election protection measures — specifically those touching postal operations — can now take effect.
"The president's got some really sharp minds at the Department of Justice. Harmeet Dhillon, who I've worked with in private practice, oversees voting rights in the Civil Rights Division. These are people who really know how to craft executive orders that stick to the law."
Observer Sign-Up: The Only Question That Matters Now
Kolodin closed with the message he has been delivering consistently: the access to observe elections at early in-person vote centers was won through litigation after years of Pima County being the only county in Arizona that excluded party observers. That access is now restored. But an empty observation slot is equivalent to no access at all.
"With observers, they're secure facilities. Without observers, they're incredibly insecure facilities."
He used the word "27 days" deliberately — this is election month in Arizona, meaning early voting runs for nearly a month before primary day on July 21st. Staffing each site each day requires a sustained volunteer commitment that most Republican organizations struggle to maintain.
Sign up at pimagop.org. The primary is July 21st. The window is already open.
Coming up on 1030 The Voice: the secretary of state debate airs June 11th at 6 p.m. The Republican gubernatorial debate airs June 17th at 6 p.m. Both will be broadcast on the station where this conversation is happening.
Tom Horne: The ESA Fight, the Competition Principle, History as a Survival Tool, and Why Eight Years Is the Right Number
Tom Horne — Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, former state attorney general, and the man Kathleen Winn used to work for — joined toward the end of the show on the ESA fight, on his record of the past four years, and on the personal history that has made his commitment to civic and history education something more than a platform position.
The ESA Ballot Threat: Decline to Sign
Two ballot initiatives are circulating that would impose income caps on Arizona's Education Savings Account program. The first would cap eligibility at $150,000 household income — which, as Winn noted, would disqualify the average married nurse and firefighter in Arizona. The cap is not indexed to inflation, meaning it erodes over time.
The second initiative, funded by out-of-state interests, has been cannibalizing signature gatherers from the first — a favorable development, since it means both measures have less momentum.
Horne's prediction: "Neither of those initiatives will succeed."
The immediate action item: the Arizona voter information pamphlet process accepts opposition statements against ballot measures. The deadline is June 24th, but the online portal has crashed before that date in prior cycles. Anyone who wants to file a formal statement opposing the ESA income-cap initiative should do so immediately.
Email for guidance: info@azlovesesas.com
Volunteers are also being sought to staff tables outside public libraries, where signature gatherers frequently operate. Holding signs and encouraging voters to decline to sign is legal, civic, and urgently needed.
Why Competition Is Not Optional
Horne's argument for ESAs is not primarily ideological. It is structural.
"Any government monopoly is inefficient. It's one of the rules of the universe."
He offered multiple analogies for the same principle: the U.S. Postal Service hemorrhaging billions annually versus the efficiency of UPS and FedEx under deregulation. Soviet workers saying "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" while American workers competed to produce. A school board negotiation he personally conducted, where a proposal to eliminate placement courses was quietly dropped the moment he pointed out it would send the best students to charter schools.
"Competition causes people to do their best. When I was on the school board, they dropped the proposal. I never heard about it again."
In three years managing the ESA program, enrollment has grown from 11,000 to over 100,000 students. Horne drew the only conclusion the math supports: if the program were bad, parents would be leaving it, not flooding into it.
"If it was bad, it would have gone from 11,000 to 2,000. It's almost ten times improved."
The Boys in Girls' Sports Fight and the AG Who Won't Help
Horne noted that he is personally in court fighting the battle to keep boys out of girls' sports — spending education department money to litigate a case that the attorney general should be handling.
"I have to spend education money to fight it in court."
He did not need to explain why Chris Mays won't take the case. The audience knows. Her 41-plus lawsuits against the Trump administration have occupied whatever litigation capacity her office is committing to the causes she actually supports.
Four More Years: The Eight-Year Rule
Asked why he is running for a fourth term, Horne offered an account of how institutional change actually works at scale.
He served as superintendent from 2003 to 2011. It took eight years to move the proficiency needle in any meaningful way across 1.2 million students. He is back in the office now, three years in. The initiatives — Project Momentum, the tutoring program, the leadership training for principals, the Student Industry Partnership with Arizona's 40 largest employers — have produced documented results: 80% of the bottom 5% of schools are no longer in the bottom 5%, math scores at one adopted school rose 27%, six-month academic gains in six-week tutoring sessions.
But eight years produces the kind of transformational change that a four-year term cannot.
"It takes eight years when you've got a billion, 1.2 million students to get a big difference in their proficiency."
The COVID complication is real. Students who lost a year or two of foundational learning in 2020 and 2021 are still working through the deficits. Florida, which kept schools open, demonstrates that the educational losses were not inevitable — they were a choice made by certain unions and administrators. Arizona's teachers union demanded closure. Governor Ducey left decisions to local districts. The results varied accordingly.
The Student Industry Partnership: TSMC and the 40 Largest Companies
One of the initiatives Horne described is among the most practically significant: the Student Industry Partnership, which connects Arizona's career technical education teachers with 40 of the state's largest employers.
The premise was a direct challenge-and-deal. Employers complained about a shortage of skilled labor. Horne's response: "I have access to 1.2 million kids. I'll get you your skilled labor. In return, you teach our CTE teachers what skills those kids need to get well-paying jobs with your company right out of high school."
The state was divided into 11 regional zones. A traveling road show allowed companies to go to the regions they hire from and meet directly with the CTE teachers serving those students.
Among the partnership members: TSMC, the semiconductor manufacturer in Tucson, which starts high school graduates at salaries Horne characterized as very competitive.
"Not everyone's going to college. We alerted them that when they graduate from high school, they have the skills necessary to get well-paying jobs in the workforce."
Why His Father's History Saved His Family
The segment's most memorable moment came when Horne shared the personal history that has animated his commitment to history education for three decades.
His parents were Jewish people in Warsaw, Poland in the 1930s. His father had not attended college — few people did at the time — but he loved history and had developed through that love the ability to interpret current events with unusual precision.
He predicted the Nazi invasion. He predicted the approximate timing of it. He tried to convince family and neighbors to leave. Nobody would listen. It is hard to leave your language, your culture, your extended family.
His mother didn't want to leave. His older sister was already born. His father, in the social conventions of the era, had more direct authority to insist.
"He made her leave."
They could not get visas to the United States. They went to Canada instead. His entire extended family — a quite large one — remained in Warsaw.
They were all killed in the Holocaust.
"I know that my immediate family survived because my father knew history and could predict and could interpret current events."
The application to Arizona's students is not metaphorical. It is direct and personal. The younger generation will face crises it has not yet imagined. The capacity to read history — to recognize the patterns, to understand that events have precedents, to apply what happened before to what is happening now — is not a cultural luxury. It is a survival tool.
"I believe the younger generation to survive is going to have to know history so they can interpret current events."
His prescription for teaching it: narrative, not memorization of isolated dates. Give students the skeleton — the order of presidents, the sequence of major events — and then put flesh on it through the stories. The stories are already fascinating. A 1910 seventh-grade history examination, distributed to college graduates today, produces a 95% failure rate. American standards were once dramatically higher. His crusade is to get back to them.
"The 250th anniversary of this nation might be a good time to bring that back."
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice.
Tuesday, June 10th: Dave Smith and Betsy Brantner Smith fill in while Winn attends the Presidential 1776 Award national finals in Washington, D.C. Arizona finalist: Sam Crumley.
Secretary of State Debate — June 11th, 6 p.m., KVOI 1030
Republican Gubernatorial Debate — June 17th, 6 p.m., KVOI 1030
ESA opposition statements — deadline June 24th but file immediately: info@azlovesesas.com
Sign up to observe elections: pimagop.org | Primary: July 21st | Registration deadline: June 22nd | Early ballots: June 24th