Candidate finds himself caught in a lie about donations
PHOENIX – Turns out there’s a reason career-politician Greg Stanton likes to rant about the influence of lobbyists in politics: He’s the poster child for taking their checks.
Over the course of his political career, Stanton has taken a total of $123,306 in cash from lobbyists (See attached PDF). Moreover, Stanton has actually denied doing so, despite evidence to the contrary. And all the while, he's pretending to chastise lobbyists.
In fact, Stanton’s appetite for lobbyist money is only accelerating. In his bid for Mayor, Stanton has taken $55,651 in lobbyist money -- collecting more than $20,000 in campaign contributions from lobbyists in that last reporting period alone. Stanton has also rolled nearly $70,000 over from his previous campaign account and is now using that money to run his mayoral campaign.
Overall, Stanton has taken nearly 700 individual lobbyist contributions. And the grand total does not include illegal contributions he's taken that have never been reported.
But despite all this, just last week during a debate on KJZZ, Stanton continued his faux rant against the influence of lobbyists and falsely claimed he hasn’t taken that much in lobbyist contributions. And he ever-so-confidently even challenged the Arizona Republic to look into the issue after Wes Gullett said: “He’s taken $100,000 of money from lobbyists.”
“Mr. Gullett made an accusation earlier about a $100,000 in lobbyist money,” Stanton replied. “It’s simply inaccurate. Hopefully, someone from the Republic is listening and they could do a fact check… I hope someone checks that because it’s a completely false statement and he just kind of throws stuff out there and see’s what sticks. People expect more from the people running for office than just kind of throwing out accusations. He’ll get zero stars on that one again.”
As the attached data proves, it’s actually Stanton who is inaccurate.
“Greg Stanton has been busted as a complete hypocrite,” said Gullett spokesman Daniel Scarpinato. “He’s spent a year ranting against lobbyists, but turns out they are keeping the lights on at his campaign headquarters.”
This comes after previous revelations about Stanton’s hypocrisy. Despite rolling out a plan to ban lobbyists from city boards and commissions, he actually voted to put those lobbyists on boards and commissions during his time on the City Council. In his last year of office alone, he voted to appoint at least 10 lobbyists.
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Paid for by Wes Gullett for Phoenix
StantonLobbyistContributions
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