The Border Is Open (For Grifting)

Monday, January 29, 2024

The irony of Sheriff Mark Lamb arguing for…campaign finance reform.

Earlier this month, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb’s son Cade Lamb (who was an infantry solider in the U.S. Army) went to the U.S.-Mexico border and filmed migrants who were receiving assistance from a nonprofit. Mark Lamb then used the video for a campaign email, asserting (without evidence) that this nonprofit camp is a “terrorist camp.”

Cade Lamb's Instgram description of his video and Mark Lamb's campaign email.

Cade Lamb did this under the auspices of a for-profit venture called Sonoran Asset Group. The LLC was incorporated in 2022 and has no other agents listed than Cade. Sonoran Asset Group doesn’t have a website, but it does have an Instagram page. (Cade Lamb has said the group is offering to take people to the U.S.-Mexico border.)

As best I can tell, the LLC is one of many for-profit ventures created by the Lamb family as a way to profit from Mark Lamb’s Senate campaign. For example, there is “Fear Not Do Right,” which interviews a variety of far-right figures, including Mark Lamb, and sells some merch. Mark Lamb’s Senate campaign disclosures also show multiple payments to his wife Janel Lamb for “strategic consulting.”

Lamb ran into some trouble earlier this year for payments of $28,000 to a group called Revi for what was labeled “campaign attire,” which is not allowed under federal elections law. (Lamb responded that they were for “campaign shirts, buttons and hats for donors and supporters.”)

The thing is, “Revi” is a bit of a mystery entity. The address listed in Lamb’s financial disclosures is a home address in Gilbert. There’s an Arizona corporation named Revi LLC based in Gilbert, but the business is all about video, not t-shirts; plus, the addresses don’t match.

But a little more digging produced results. The registered owner of Revi LLC Jared Maples, whose address DOES match Lamb’s disclosure statement, posted a picture of himself posing with Donald Trump. According to his Instagram, he runs a variety of other businesses, including the production of “whiskey guns.” So is Whiskey Guns making “campaign shirts, buttons and hats for donors and supporters”?

From the Instagram page for Whiskey Guns

From the social media of Jared Maples of Revi LLC

I tried to contact Maples at the email listed on his corporation filing (jared.marples555@gmail.com) and through the Instagram for “Whiskey Guns,” but have received no reply as of publication. I also emailed Lamb’s campaign (freedom@sherifflamb.com) but received no response as of publication.

Lamb has certainly not seemed shy about mixing his job as “Pinal County Sheriff” (for which he gets a salary) with his role as a man running for Senate with his aspiration to be a far-right influencer. He created a line of t-shirts based on a PSA his office produced. (Note: while the link to Sheriff Mark Lamb’s campaign store works, his entire Senate campaign website is down.) Plus, there was the whole helicopter incident.

Just last week, Mark and Cade Lamb, alongside the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office second-in-command Matthew Thomas, were at Shot Show in Las Vegas, a large firearm/ weapons conference. There, Mark Lamb did a variety of “work” as a firearms influencer while also touting his Senate run. (A lot of this off-the-books campaigning might be because Lamb’s campaign does not have a lot of money, especially as compared to his opponent Kari Lake’s campaign.)

Cade Lamb’s video is part of a bourgeoning category of far-right filmmaking that features videographers storming camps run by non-profits in trucks, heavily armed and with their faces covered, and filming what they say are “military-aged men” receiving government aid. Melissa Del Bosque at Border Chronicle reported first-hand this rush of fake journalists at the U.S.-Mexico border who, armed with AK-47s, ballistic armor, and iPhones, are filming migrants and nonprofit workers to drum up anxiety.

The Lamb family recently appeared with Kyle Rittenhouse at Shot Show, and Rittenhouse is now the face of an Arizona-based body armor company.  While claiming he was in Arizona “training,” he also posted a photo of himself doing a ride-along with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office. (I contacted the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office for comment, but they did not respond as of publication.)

Kyle Rittenhouse with deputies from the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office

Kyle Rittenhouse in AZ

You can see where this is all going. Lamb and his family appear to be using his Senate campaign and his office as sheriff as vehicles to produce propaganda that is false and harmful to immigrants but a nice source of eyeballs for merch. It’s not clear to me how much of this is legal – experts I ask have told me there is no bright line in sheriff campaigning between the office and the campaign – but I think that calls for an audit of Lamb’s office are well-founded.