Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes threatened to take House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to court on Tuesday for refusing to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) to the House.
During an appearance on CNN’s Laura Coates Live, Mayes accused Johnson of holding the state “hostage” to avoid releasing government files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I really think that we are going to have no other choice, Laura, except to take Speaker Johnson to court if he refuses to respond to us, if he doesn’t quickly swear in Adelita Grijalva, again depriving her of the ability to help her constituents,” said Mayes:
We’ve had some flooding out here in Arizona. She has no way to help those people in southern Arizona who have been impacted by that flooding. So many other things that she can and should be doing as an elected member of Congress, and so if I have to, I’ll take him to court. You know, again, there’s no legitimate reason for him to refuse to swear her in right now. No other reason that I can think of except that perhaps she’s the final vote to discharge the Epstein files, and it’s not fair for Mike Johnson to be holding the state of Arizona hostage because he doesn’t wanna release the Epstein files.
Host Laura Coates responded, “He, of course, says that is not the motivation. Obviously you don’t buy that.”
Mayes is still waiting to be sworn in, nearly a month after she was elected to the House in a special election to succeed her father Raul Grijalva, who died in office earlier this year.
While the representative-elect was finally given the keys to her congressional office on Tuesday, she quickly discovered there were no working phone lines, internet, or computers.
In a letter to Johnson on Tuesday, Mayes demanded that Grijalva “be allowed to assume her seat without further delay,” or face “prompt legal action.”
“You and your staff have provided ever-shifting, unsatisfactory, and sometimes absurd stories as to why Ms. Grijalva has not been sworn in,” she wrote. “We thus demand that Ms. Grijalva be immediately sworn into office and admitted to her rightful seat. We ask that within two days of the date of this letter, you provide this Office with your assurance of when and where that will take place, which must be immediate and prior to the date the House comes back into regular session. Should you fail to provide such assurance, we will be forced to seek judicial relief to protect Arizona and the residents of its Seventh Congressional District.”
Watch above via CNN.
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