When your campaign is taking heat over working to reduce penalties for men caught with underage prostitutes, maybe equivocating isn’t the best strategy.
Last night, AZ Family aired a blistering fact check confirming that Sinema did in fact fight to protect criminals caught with child prostitutes from tougher charges. The fact checker also tore apart Sinema’s original defense on the issue, making clear that Sinema only voted for the legislation after the provision she objected to was removed from the final bill.
Even worse, when Sinema was asked whether she had a change of mind, her campaign basically doubled down and offered only a statement that was “vaguely worded” where “you can’t really tell whether she changed her mind” or not.
Ouch.
But then again, after Sinema took $33,800 from the founders of the sex trafficking website Backpage.com – she’s already abundantly clear where she stands on the issue.
Click here to watch the segment. A transcript follows.
ANCHOR: “So how is the Sinema campaign reacting to this ad?”
POLITICAL EDITOR DENNIS WELCH: “What they’re saying is that she ended up voting for this bill. Which is true … however, it was written in a way that allowed that defense. To say look, Judge, I didn’t know they were under 18. If you could show there was no way that you could possibly know they were under 18, you could use that argument. So she voted for that, after that provision was taken out.”
ANCHOR: “So has she changed her mind on the issue?”
WELCH: “Well that’s interesting because I had asked that question of the campaign and they sent me a statement just a few minutes ago. It was vaguely worded and you can’t really tell whether she changed her mind, it was just a re-affirmation that Kyrsten Sinema has done a lot of work on you know, child issues…”