AG Tim Griffin tries and fails to defend his malfeasance on abortion petition with disastrous video

Tim Griffin is seething. 

On Friday, the state’s ambitious and Machiavellian attorney general released the unseemly video above. He clumsily presents a PowerPoint and tries desperately to bamboozle the public about the legal issues in the abortion ballot initiative case — possibly because he realizes his efforts to fool the state Supreme Court could wind up coming short (a decision is expected soon, perhaps Monday). Unfortunately, no one on his team informed him that this might be a bad idea.

The sloppily produced video is tedious and bumbling, and has been panned across the ideological spectrum among the few who bothered to watch. But when I look into his raisin-like eyes, I do not see much passion behind the propaganda. I see nothing but hurt.

Griffin’s arguments in the video have already been presented in many pages of briefs he’s filed in the state Supreme Court case to determine the future of the ballot initiative to restore abortion rights in the state. They are illogical and bizarre, the result of a series of novel and capricious rules made up on the fly. They have been dismantled in court not just by the abortion petitioners, but by the high-powered legal teams of two well-funded petition groups that have nothing to do with abortion. In this breathy new tutorial, just as he did in his legal briefs, Griffin recites a series of obfuscations, nonsensical claims and outright lies. All in an embarrassing attempt to cover up the scandal he has needlessly created in his increasingly strained attempt to keep abortion off the ballot by any means necessary.

Griffin painted himself into a corner weeks ago because he refused to admit error and has been scrambling ever since. The situation was humiliating enough, but he has now lowered himself to yet slimier and pettier depths — even more conniving and hamfisted — with his new turn as YouTube influencer. The video is easy to tease, because it’s a 20-minute (!) PowerPoint presentation that looks like something out of “The Office.” No shade to the HR employees out there, but if a politician sounds like an HR presentation that people are extremely annoyed they have to attend, that is not good politics! Griffin’s performance in this video is roughly on par with Joe Biden’s debate debacle.

But given the timing, it’s also a tacky — and arguably unethical — gambit at an end-around of the judicial process. The video was released just after 5 p.m. on Friday, right around the time that many thought the Court might issue a ruling in the abortion case. There is no way to know, but this led to speculation that Griffin might have been tipped off that a decision is coming Monday — and perhaps even that the decision was not going to be in his favor.

Could PowerPoint Timmy’s video have been an ill-fated attempt to put political pressure on the justices? Putting his side out publicly, in a more digestible form than legal briefs, could be a way of signaling that he wants to try to impose a political cost on justices who won’t cave to his gobbledygook — pre-registering an attack on the court. This is a man, after all, who once got caught stealing a political opponent’s yard sign from a neighbor and ripping it up. But as with that situation, just because he’s nefarious doesn’t mean he’s competent. This video is such an embarrassing fiasco that it doesn’t even show off much in the way of political teeth. It just looks weak.

I have no idea how the court will rule. Given the political makeup of the justices, it’s always been assumed that Griffin would be the favorite in an abortion case. He could still win! But it’s hard to understand the motivation behind this bizarre video unless he is worried he will lose. Maybe his message was not for the courtroom but for the public. Perhaps he was hoping to get ahead of the story and protect himself from looking pathetic if he loses the case most once thought he would win. 

Or maybe — shudder to think — he thought this video would be so convincing and persuasive that it would change a justice’s mind on the merits. That would be a strange act of hubris. But it’s also more than a little unseemly: Briefs in the case already had a due date, and now he’s making a post-hoc, eleventh hour PowerPoint presentation begging the court to see things his way after his logic was destroyed in the briefs? Yikes. I can only speculate, but surely at least some of the justices are shocked and annoyed by such outlandish misbehavior.

Here’s how we got to this point. When the abortion petitioners turned in more than 100,000 signatures from Arkansans last month to put their measure on the ballot, Republicans started feeling nervous. Could it be that Arkansas — a state theoretically about as anti-abortion as you can find — might vote to undo the state’s near absolute ban if the issue was put directly to voters?

But after the petitioners turned in their signatures on the July 5 deadline, Republican state officials thought they had a gotcha: A customary piece of paperwork was missing from the final submission from Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), the group pushing the abortion measure. We can’t know what was going on in everyone’s heads, but my guess is that Griffin and company legitimately thought at the time that they had discovered an error that would preemptively disqualify the entire ballot initiative. Secretary of State John Thurston announced that he was doing just that on July 10. And Griffin took to Twitter to spike the football, scolding AFLG: “The abortion advocates have no one to blame but themselves.” Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined in the social media taunting: “Today the far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent.” 

Griffin had to be feeling good. Sanders has the unbending power that Griffin has thirsted for his entire career. One can imagine him patting himself on the back after composing his triumphant tweet: Now you’re cooking with gas, Griffin.

But there was a problem: In their glee, state officials had rushed and apparently failed to check just what the statutes actually say. And it turns out the law didn’t say what Griffin thought it said. The plain language in the statutes clearly appeared to indicate that the group should not have been preemptively disqualified. In fact, many of the signatures that the secretary of state made allegations against seemed not to be invalid at all. In other words, after disqualifying the signatures of more than 100,000 Arkansans for an alleged ticky-tacky rules violation, it turned out that state officials weren’t following the rules themselves.

Did Griffin realize his mistake? We cannot know for certain, but it certainly looks like he did based on what happened next: Thurston’s original explanation for the disqualification was discarded, with a series of new explanations that made less and less sense as a matter of law or logic. All this flailing sure looked like a realization that the original explanation didn’t work with the law. So they started wildly trying to come up with new excuses to retrofit the law to justify their action. Mistakes happen! But they couldn’t back down and admit they were wrong. That would make Griffin (and Sanders) look like fools. Can’t have that.

As he threw random stuff against the wall, Griffin wound up accidentally (or so it seems) jeopardizing two other ballot initiative efforts: one pushing for an expansion of the state’s medical marijuana program and another that opposes the casino license awarded to Cherokee Nation Entertainment in Pope County earlier this year. It turns out that these groups had the very same problem with one of the more goofy excuses Griffin conjured — a novel rule with no basis in law about who counts as a “sponsor” when signing paperwork regarding paid canvassers. This rule, which state officials claimed to have conveniently “discovered” out of the blue, had never been applied to other groups, this year or in the past. The law seemed to say precisely the opposite of the claims behind this rule — and longstanding precedent in agency law rendered it ridiculous. “This is something that the secretary of state and the attorney general made up,” commented a prominent attorney involved in other direct democracy efforts.

In the comedy of errors that followed, Griffin wound up taking the opposite side of his own argument in another case. And Thurston found himself applying this rule in three different ways to three different groups: None of the signatures from paid canvassers by the abortion group were allowed, some of them by the marijuana group were allowed and all of them by the casino group were allowed. The marijuana and casino groups intervened in the abortion case to try to stop the madness. In their brief, they wrote that neither the secretary of state nor the attorney general “has provided an explanation for their inconsistent interpretations and actions between the three initiative petition sponsors. Nor can they; it does not exist.”

The whole thing is a mess. No matter what the court decides, the bopping around from one flimsy excuse to another paints an ugly picture: It increasingly appears that after their original justification fell flat, state officials began conspiring to twist the law to block the abortion petition by any means necessary, violating the constitutional rights of more than 100,000 Arkansans.

This video is the latest volley in Griffin’s scandalous maneuvering. If his affect is strained, that is a reflection of his arguments: He is like a man playing whack-a-mole on his own brain.

One challenging aspect about covering this story is that it’s hard to explain just how nonsensical Griffin’s points are without getting into the weeds. But Griffin is banking on that. He is hoping that if he says the law is on his side, few will have the wherewithal to check. Sometimes statutory language is vague or confusing. This is not one of those cases. If we simply go by what the law says, he is wrong. It’s not close. This leaves Griffin twisting himself into a pretzel, blipping around contradictory ideas like a psychedelic fidget spinner of illogic.

But without the statutes in front of you, it’s not immediately obvious that Griffin is arguing in bad faith. In a recent interview with Roby Brock, columnist John Brummett characterized the legal debate as being between those on one side who say that it’s silly to disqualify 100,000 citizens expressing a constitutional right (also true!) versus those on the other side who say that the law says what it says and the rules have to be followed. But if the rules under the law were simply not on the abortion petitioners’ side, the lawsuit would have been dismissed long ago. That’s not what’s going on, as much as Griffin would like you to think so. The law says what it says, yes: It says that Thurston made a mistake and that the review process should continue for the abortion petitioners. If you want to be rulesy and precise, that applies both ways: State officials have to follow the rules, too!

I don’t mean to give Brummett a hard time; this stuff is hard to follow. But that’s what makes Griffin’s obfuscation, crystallized in his video, so nefarious. He is misleading the public to cover up his own corruption.

While it’s clear that Griffin has flown far afield from anything that can actually be found in the law, if four of the Supreme Court justices want to kill the abortion case, they can side with him nevertheless. At the end of the day, the law is whatever they say it is. 

But that doesn’t justify Griffin engaging in pure Calvinball. His video offers nothing new, simply asserting the same false claims as fact (at times even contradicted by the statutory language on the screen), only this time with television makeup and hokey graphics. Without re-litigating every point in detail, I will note just a fraction of the reasons that Griffin’s claims in this video are not just a stretch, but such baloney that judges truly seeking to fairly apply the law would laugh them out of court.

The attorney general’s lies should not go unchallenged; consider this a representative sample. I’m going to use shorthand here without much explanation, as we’ve done our best to explain the finer points in numerous previous posts (see for example here and here). If you’re already convinced of Griffin’s dishonesty or you’re not interested in the legal analysis, I’d strongly advise skipping ahead!

• Griffin completely skips past one of the most important issues in the case: Even if the abortion petitioners violated the Training Statement requirement, that is not a “facial” violation. Such signatures should not be culled until the final phase of review, giving the petitioners a potential opportunity to earn a “cure” period. 
• This omission is striking because it’s one of the clearest and most straightforward issues in the case. The law explicitly lists the only violations that count as facial. Lawmakers went out of their way to be as clear as possible on this, so there could be no confusion. The Training Statement is not one of them.
• Moreover, the Training Statement is instead listed in a separate statute whose title explains it’s about “Sufficiency” (elsewhere understood to refer to the final phase of review) and “Corrections” (which would make no sense if the violations are existential or pre-emptively facial in the way Griffin suggests). This statute generally covers simple process issues to make the secretary of state’s job easier, with requirements that are self-evidently less serious than those listed elsewhere as facial violations (and includes many references to the end of the process, again nonsensical if the statute is meant to list violations pre-emptively stopping the entire process before it starts).
• If there was any doubt, the Training Statement statute explicitly says that a shortfall created after these violations can be addressed in the cure period (“Corrections”) — with language nearly identical to the cure process described in the constitution. It would be a contradiction in terms if these violations were required to be disqualified prior to ever reaching that stage. Griffin has never once addressed this fundamental problem. His claim simply makes no sense.
• The word “shall” in the Training Statement statute is irrelevant. Several other statutes (all obviously more vital or existential to the core purposes of the law) include the word “shall” but are nevertheless dutifully listed in the list of facial violations. That is because that list is meant to be complete, without any room for doubt. The Training Statement is not included because it was never meant to be facial, a dynamic made all the more obvious after reviewing the legislative debate and the process by which the statues were amended. If the justices care even a little bit about the intent of the legislature, it’s even more of a no-brainer. At every turn, Griffin’s interpretation renders other statutes gratuitous, contradictory or flatly illogical. There is no justification for his interpretation beyond motivated reasoning to fit the conclusion he wants to reach.
• Griffin’s video reiterates his fictional claim that the paid canvassing company contractor cannot sign as “sponsor.” He ignores the fact that the law used to define “sponsor” as only the person who files the petition, but was updated in the very same piece of legislation establishing the rules in question to more broadly include others, apparently including a contractor acting as the sponsor’s agent. Griffin mischievously keeps pointing to the word “sponsor” on his Powerpoint screen without ever showing the definition of “sponsor” in the law, which indisputably shows the point he’s trying to make is without merit. Sad.
• He preposterously claims that his office just happened to discover this problem they no one had ever noticed before, despite the fact that the secretary of state’s office had accepted countless pieces of paperwork that clearly had this issue without incident. They had done this for years. Likewise, he mysteriously says that it was “unclear” whether the casino group had this problem until they admitted as much as intervenors, despite his office already having the documents in question. Just goofball stuff. The only explanation of this rule appearing “out of the ether,” as the marijuana and casino intervenors put it, is that Griffin made up a new rule designed to try to justify expelling the abortion petitioners after the initial reason fell flat. Such an eleventh-hour change, in any case, should be applied prospectively, not retrospectively, if state officials had any concern for due process. And it would be applied the same way to all petitioners, which Thurston clearly did not do. If he cannot reverse his decision on the other groups, how can he justify now penalizing the abortion group for the very same thing? And why did Griffin deny in court that the casino group had violated this provision at all?
• He complains that media coverage has conflated the Training Statement and the Background Statement (ahem); in fact, it is precisely the clear differences between them that reveal the problem with Thurston’s actions under the law. The Background statement is facial, while the Training Statement is not; the Background statement must be turned in with new hires before paid canvassers hit the field, whereas the Training Statement has no timing requirement but only those canvassers covered are valid. Griffin’s insistence that a complete list must be submitted on July 5 is a demand of his own creation. The list the abortion petitioners turned in on June 27 sufficiently covers those canvassers listed; anyone not on the list would be flagged for a violation, a practice the secretary of state already follows without dismissing the entire batch of paid canvassers, as Thurston did for the abortion petitioners.

One could go on, but let’s stop there. His presentation is not just awkward, it is willfully misleading nonsense.

“It requires leadership to follow the law wherever it leads,” Griffin says in the video. That’s a quality the attorney general has proven he sorely lacks.

What Griffin’s presentation lacks in intellectual rigor or factual accuracy, it makes up for in dreadful production value. Perhaps recovering from screaming about his predicament, he has to struggle past the frog in his throat. When he mispronounces the word “similar,” it suggests less a folksy touch than foggy thinking. The camera angles change without explanation, like an auteur’s unchecked flourishes. Griffin’s theatrical use of spirit fingers to denote air quotes has similar panache. And the sound is likewise experimental: “Not sure why he released it in mono all in the left channel,” a Twitter user commented. “Really odd with headphones.”

The set’s background strangely features his full name over and over again – a subtle reminder of just who’s to blame for this debacle. Surely it has occurred to Gov. Sanders that at some point she may need to throw the hapless Griffin under the bus. The pathos is almost unbearable. The “you’ll never be governor” energy just jumps out of the screen.

Among the many hilariously confusing questions about this video: Who is this supposed to be for? Anyone who has followed this closely knows that the pitch he’s making is tendentious at best. Anyone who hasn’t followed this closely is going to be utterly confused and painfully bored. It is neither educational nor entertaining. I would be shocked if many viewers (the video has around 700 total views thus far) make it to the end. I have been following this about as closely as anyone, and I found it an unbearable slog.

Griffin claims that he felt compelled to do this in order to inform the public about a matter they care about. But the truth is, no one cares about these piddly rules or his goofball interpretation of them. People care about abortion. And people care about fairness. “It’s a rigorous process,” Griffin says of ballot initiatives. “It should be.” And fair enough – these are laws or changes to the constitution that impact millions of Arkansans. But the rigorous part is the incredible effort to collect more than 100,000 signatures, meeting challenging thresholds in fifty different counties across the state. The paperwork – even leaving aside the fact that Griffin isn’t even close to applying the rules correctly on that – is just busybody compliance stuff. He is fussing about exactly who signed what compliance statement when. It’s just paperwork.

The most nefarious part of the video is that Griffin heavily implies that the abortion petitioners failed to comply with the actual training requirements for paid canvassers in the law. But no one has made any such allegation. The abortion petitioners trained their paid canvassers. They gave them the handbook. They had them undergo criminal background checks and verified that they passed. There is no allegation of fraud or misbehavior of any kind. Like many power-hungry gatekeepers, Griffin mistakes petty rules for purpose.

There’s no use betting on the outcome from the court, but a consensus has emerged that Griffin’s haphazard performance may have put victory in jeopardy. He may yet win the case, but he has made a mockery of the process. He has no one to blame but himself.