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We love hearing from you because we genuinely want to know your questions. We genuinely care about what you care about and who you are. We'd like to hear the stories of everyday people. People like Bill Gates. Not that Bill Gates, but for an example, Bill Gates, a lifelong Republican who became a Maricopa County supervisor, that's in Arizona. Basically, he's had his life upended by Donald Trump's Stop the Steal movement. My colleague, David Axelrod actually interviewed Bill Gates earlier this year on his podcast, The Ax Files. I wanted to bring you a portion of that conversation today. On Thursday, we're going to bring you an episode of Anderson Coopers, All There is, and then I'll be back with new episodes of The Assignment starting on January second. So happy holidays. Thank you for listening and please stick around because this is a fascinating conversation. It's one of.

The things I'm interested in is just how well-motivated public officials trying to do their job, dealt personally with the byproduct of the rage of our time. You faced another crisis, which was the pandemic. Tell me about that, because that was really when you began being targeted in a way that was beyond what people were accustomed to in politics.

Yeah, that really was when I would say everything changed. Generally, having this reputation as a conservative Republican had never had a primary up to that point, never been challenged in the primary. And then we also are the public health authority here at Maricope County. And as I think most people know who followed these things, Maricope County, Arizona, were hit very hard by COVID, and we had some of the highest rates in the country. And so once we hit the summer of 2019, our public health officials came to us and said, We are recommending a mass mandate for Maricopa County. And that was a tough boat for all of us, but particularly the four Republicans. But we made the boat because we looked at our experts and they told us we needed to do this to save lives. We knew that was a controversial decision. We had, frankly, a lot of mayors who were calling us, asking us to take this action because they didn't want to have to make these tough votes in their jurisdictions. And I felt that it was important that we had this... We took this burden on... I mean, Mary Copeland County is the second largest public health authority in the country after New York and L.

A. So there are a lot of lives on the line. And as the third largest after New York and L. A, we took that seriously. But even though knowing that this would be controversial, it did not prepare me for what would come. Shortly after that vote on the mass mandate, the mailboxes in our neighborhood, including ours, were filled with really a gruesome flyer that someone had prepared that showed me with a whip, whether it's the type of these racist stereotypes and and suggesting that we were masters over our residents here when all we were doing was trying to keep people safe. We were trying to keep people safe.

Talk to me about that, and particularly, and I want to come back to this a few times. You have a family. You mentioned your daughters, and you adopted a third child from Uganda. Tell me about the impact on your family of this ugliness because those flyers were meant to inflame, and they did inflame.

Yes, they did. In fact, there was a tweet that someone sent out in the last week where they pulled that flyer back up and they're continuing to spread it around. But as you mentioned, we had a third daughter join the family. Our daughter, we became her permanent legal guardian in 2019, and we were thrilled. She was a sophomore in high school. And so she saw this flyer. And again, clearly, racist undertones of this. And for her, that's when it really came home to me that... And you hear that, right? It's like, Well, you get into politics and it has an impact on your family. And I understood that, but I never understood it like I did that day. And there have been many other incidents involving our daughter subsequently. And perhaps when you run for US Senate, you run for the presidency, you think of yourself as living in a fish bowl, but not county board of supervisors. You don't imagine that, and you don't imagine the psychological toll that this would have on anyone, but particularly with teenage daughters. And so that's part of my story. That's part of our story as a family and how we've dealt with it and the courage of my wife and our daughters to share our story together.

I'm so proud of them for that. But I feel a lot of guilt for it, too, quite frankly. Because if I hadn't made that decision to run for office, they would have never had to deal with this.

Did they hear about it in school?

Did they- Absolutely, yeah. This is something that they heard about. There was a particular day when we had a... There was a vote of the Arizona Senate to hold of my colleagues and I in contempt.

This was around the election?

Yeah.

You wouldn't surrender the ballots?

That's right. The ballots and the tabulation machines. I had one daughter by this point was now a freshman at Gonzaga, and she's calling, trying to frantically get a hold of my wife. What's going on with dad? Is dad in jail? This is what I'm hearing. Another daughter, she was still in high school, and she literally heard this news and collapsed in the hallway.

Well, you had also written them had you not prepared them for the worst. They were anticipating something horrible happening.

Yeah, they were. I wanted them to understand my thinking why my colleagues and I had drawn a line in the sand here. Although we had... The Arizona State Senate had this information. We wanted to make sure that we were not violating the law. Again, as a lawyer, I always come back to this. I felt like I've just been trying to follow the law, not trying to make a political statement here. But unfortunately, in this politicized environment, you have folks going to this extent where if it were not for the courage of Paul Boyer, the one Republican state senator who voted against that resolution, told us in contempt, we would have likely been detained again, just for doing our job. So I was very conscious and my wife and I were both very conscious as parents to try and make sure the girls had a lesson out of this. And the lesson was that you have to stand up for what you believe in, even when it can have a negative impact on you professionally and as a person.

Yeah, we should talk about the run-up to that moment because you saw the storm clouds gathering in 2020 as the election approached and some of the static that President Trump was raising about projectively about whether the election was going to be an honest, legitimate election or not. When did you start getting concerned about that rhetoric? And when did you start worrying about what that might mean?

I was aware of the statements of President Trump that he was going to withhold judgment on whether he would acknowledge the results. But there was part of me that thought, Well, is this bluster? Is he really going to do this? When it became real for all of us here in Maricopa County was a couple of days after the election in November of 2020, when we started seeing folks gathering outside of our tabulation center here, people like Alex Jones coming, Paul Gozaar, and challenging the results. There was a real concern that this large group, I referred to it as Lollapalooza for the alt right, that they might storm the tabulation center. Remember, this was before January 6, 2021. And so working with our sheriff, Paul Penzone, has just been incredible, able to very quickly put up some temporary protection to ensure that those election workers remain safe. But at that point, it became clear to me the rhetoric that we started hearing from Kelly Ward.

Chairman of the party, yeah.

That's right. And that this was something different. But throughout it, I am an optimist. I've said that many times over the past few years, I always thought that once we got to the brink, they would blink and we would move forward, as we have in every other presidential election throughout the history of this country.

We should note, parentaly, that Paul Penzone defeated Joe Arpaio, who very much was a person of that part of the right. You wonder what would have happened were he in office at the time of all of this.

I've thought about that many times.

The questions were about election machines, about just run through the category of charges that were being leveled at you because Arizona was won by 11,000 votes. It wasn't enough to tip the outcome of the election, but it was a linchpin of the election. And so 11,000 votes aren't very many. Talk about the charges that were leveled and how you received them.

Yes. So machines were really the number one objection. And this is when we started hearing about the Dominion machines, because we do use the Dominion machines here in Marcopa County. Question suggestions that they could flip boats and then that Hugo Cháves built the machines. And we started hearing about Italian satellites. And there was a plane, allegedly, there was a plane that came from China and landed at Sky Harbor Airport here in Phoenix with ballots that were injected. The traditional one with your background from Chicago, you're familiar with the dead people voting. I had a variety of these. Kelly Ward, on the day that we voted to certify the election, would texted me many of these allegations. As a lawyer and as an elected official, it was my job, I felt, to track down each and every one of these allegations, as fanciful as they might seem. I was starting to understand the focus that was on Maricopa County and that people needed to... I voted to certify many elections, both at the city council and at Maricopa County. And it's usually just ministerial.

It's a ministerial, yeah.

Yeah. I knew that this was going to be different, and I felt that it was very important. I'd like to think that this is when we started to really develop this approach of maximum transparency with Maricopa County elections. I wanted this to be a very transparent process for the people to see what questions were being raised and getting answers to them.

Was your original inclination to believe that by doing that, that people would see the lunacy of some of these charges and would dismiss them?

That was part of it. But honestly, it was also, Let's get to the bottom of this. If our folks couldn't answer these questions, that would raise dire concerns on my part. But they could. They did. And I was satisfied, and that's why I voted to certify the election in November of 2020.

And when you did that, did you fear for your safety? Did you fear for your family's safety?

It's interesting because that evening... So this was back during COVID protocols, so there was no public in the auditorium. It ended up being about a two and a half hour long meeting, again, just to certify the election, so unprecedented. But we could hear people outside of the auditorium, chanting and banging on drums. It was a little a little unsettling, I'll admit. But as we left the auditorium, we were walked to our cars by the security services. I can't remember ever having that happen before as an elected official. This was foreign to me at the time, but I thought they were just trying to be extra careful, and this was a prudent measure. But that was really the beginning in many ways of what became a new way of new normal, unfortunately, for those of us associated with elections.

You had to, from time to time, move your family from your home. You stayed in Airbnb's and other places because of threats and concerns.

Yeah, that's right. Again, this is not the thing that you would anticipate at the local level, Maricoa County Board of Supervisors. But we were advised to do that either we were staying in Airbnb's undisclosed locations or we were in our house, but we had sheriff's deputies or other law enforcement outside of the house overnight. So you just don't expect that.

No, and that must have been terrible for your kids.

It was. And each kid is different, right? And we know that everyone is different. Some were terrified, some took it more in stride. But as a family, it had a significantly negative impact that no one expected.

And this went on for a long time because your state Senate, you said that the President of the state Senate, who was a Republican, told you that she knew that these charges were unfounded, but that she felt she had to carry through, presumably under political pressure to... And this went on for months. This led to that point where they subpoenaed ballots, the ballots, the machines, and everything, and you guys drew a line. They brought in their own auditor, if you can call this outfit, that these cyber Ninjas from Florida who had close ties to Trump and the Republicans, and they carried on a months-long audit. And what did the audit find?

Well, after going through all that, the audit found that Joe Biden actually received more votes in Maricopa County than even we had reported in the elections department. But we now know that those were completely made up numbers. Their handcount was a farce. We know that they have begredinally turned over documents, turned over text messages. This was nothing more than a drift, which I don't think any of us anticipated. This was an effort. They determined to raise money and to sow further doubt about elections. What is so sad to me is that these folks were looking for a willing, I'll say it, co-conspirator to perform an audit like this. I'm so sad that it was my state and the state Senate here in my state that agreed to allow this to fester. Then, really, we started seeing folks in other parts of the country then calling for a, quote, Arizona-style audit, which it was no audit at all.

Hey, Bill, you must have watched this case of Dominion versus Fox News with great interest, and I'm struck by the fact that as we sit here today, two-thirds of Republicans still believe that the election was illegitimate that it was fraudulent in some way. And a lot of it has to do with where they're getting their so-called news from or information from. And that's also outgrowth of that and right-wing media outlets is where people like you have been demonized. What's the way? How do you free your party from that? And is there a way to free your party from that? Because you went through this again in 2022. You have a candidate for governor in your state, Carrie Lake, who lost and continues to this day to suggest because there were some printer issues in Maricopa County that the election was stolen from her and basically, rallying people to take up arms.

Yeah. There's a lot there to unpack. But I can tell you that I have made the decision to remain a Republican because I believe there are a lot of... Again, the polls show that it's unfortunately a minority who believe that Joe Biden, in fact, won in 2020. It's a minority who do not believe that there's a significant amount of systemic fraud in our elections. I placed the blame primarily on the leaders of our own party. We, as Republicans, I thought a lot about this. And I think, Republicans, we tend to be more we respect authority and follow our leaders. Our leaders across the board have either raised significant questions about our elections or they've remained silent. It is such a small few of us who have raised our voices in support of the truth and in support of the safe and secure elections that we have in this country, as we've been called the Maricoa Republicans, and then Rusty Bowers, of course, Adam Kinsinger, Liz Cheney. But I think that it's going to take people to have the courage to stand up and say, I'm a conservative Republican, perhaps. I'm pro-life. These are all the things I believe in.

And by the way, I also think we have safe and secure elections. I think that Joe Biden won in 2020, and I think we can beat Joe Biden in 2024 for the following reasons. It's up to us. I continue to... People say this democracy is in peril. Well, the only way we get out of this is through the Republican Party. Through the Republican Party, having a true discussion about who we are, what we believe in, supporting the truth. Do I think it's easy? No. It's going to be very, very difficult.

We're going to take a short break, and we'll be right back with more of the AX Files.

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Anderson Cooper is back with Season 2 of his podcast, All There Is. For the holidays approaching, which can be difficult for so many of us, I'll talk with Amanda Petrusich, a music writer for The New Yorker whose husband, Brett, died suddenly in 2022. All There Is with Anderson Cooper is about how we can live on with loss and with love. She's now figuring out how to raise their young daughter on her own. How do I encourage her to understand that grief is normal? Grief is love. Listen to All There Is with Anderson Cooper wherever you get your podcasts.

Now back to the show.

On Carrie Lake, given the death threats that you've had and given your concerns about not just yourself, but your family, what do you think when she repeatedly invokes the Second Amendment and maybe it's time and so on? Because the inference isn't even subtle.

Yeah, I have great concern by this denormalization of political violence or the suggestion of political violence, regardless of wherever these are Republicans or Democrats. I'm particularly disappointed in my fellow Republicans who do not call this out. I've done that. My colleagues have done that. We'll continue to do that. We can debate the issues. We can have a hard-nosed debate. I think that's great. I think that's how we get to good public policy in many ways. But invoking political violence, this is not a game, and it has to stop before someone gets hurt. We are focused here in Maricopa County on keeping our elections workers safe and our voters safe. But my colleagues and I are actually victims in prosecutions that are going on right now of folks because words are not... Words are real. Words inspire people to do things and violations of election laws by people threatening elections officials. They're being taken seriously both by the Department of Justice in here on the local level. So I'll take this opportunity once more to call upon all folks in elected office and candidates to knock it off, knock it off before someone gets hurt or even killed.

Do you think that she's someone who should be in some way held accountable for her work? Or the election is enough?

I think that, again, I'm not a prosecutor by trade. I'll leave that to the prosecutors to decide whether crimes have been committed. But I can tell you, as a human, this is wrong. This is wrong to suggest that, one, we are all committing crimes because that's what she and many others have suggested, that we're committing crimes, that we're rigging elections, and then tying that to suggesting that we need to be hung, we need to be shot, we need to be poisoned. It's not just her. It's other Republican politicians in this state who have done it, and it needs to stop now. And my fellow Republicans need to start speaking out against it more.

The question is whether you think that that Republican Party still exists or at least exists in numbers that are adequate.

I think that it can still be done. I think that there is enough of those folks who have bought into this denialism who can still be brought around. But it's not going to be easy. This is a long-term project. But as many people say to me, and I couldn't agree more, this democracy must have two healthy parties to be successful.

I believe that myself. We have this mutual friend, Rusty Bowers, who is the... I can call him a friend now because he's not running for anything. I don't want to destroy his political career. But I came to know him after he displayed such courage as the Speaker of the House in facing down the President of the United States who wanted him to do things that were inappropriate to try and tilt the election after the fact in his direction. But he ran for the state Senate after having done that, and he lost handily, two to one. Isn't that where the Republican Party is now? I mean, Donald Trump, as we said here today, is under two indictments with maybe more pending and is still the front runner for your party's nomination.

Yeah. I was very disappointed to see Rusty lose his race. We did have in that same ballot, Tom Galvin, who's one of my colleagues on the board of supervisors, who was successful in a primary. Now, he had about 40 % of the vote. And so the folks on the election deniers that he was running against the three of them, they split the vote. So much in the same way that Donald Trump has taken advantage of the first, pass the post, winner take all primaries, I think that those could be used to support those like me who believe in the truth. But it's going to take some luck, right? We need some races like this where they're one of us and three or four of those who are.

Election deniers. And yet you're not running again.

So I'm not running again. But I think it's important for people to understand why I'm not running again. This is not an admission that I think I can't win. This is someone here who's served in locally elected office for 14 years. At the end of this term, I will have had eight years on the board of supervisors. I've never viewed myself as a professional politician. I have other things that I want to do in my life. If I would have run for re-election, I'll admit it would have been a tough race, run against a Republican. But this is not an admission that I can't win an election. It's a much more complicated calculus, much more complex calculus that includes wanting to spend a little bit more time with my family after all that our family has been through.

Well, I want to ask you about what you've been through, because one of the other great interests of mine is mental health. And you've been very open about your struggles around these controversies and these pressures, starting with the pandemic and what happened around it and through all of these trials involving the elections. Talk to me about that about your own mental health.

Yeah, this has been very difficult for me. I have identified, as you've heard in this podcast, I've identified as a Republican since the earliest memories that I have. I've identified as hopefully someone with integrity who believes in following the law, the rule of law. And through all of this, that has been questioned over and over again, and questioned many times by my friends, my political allies. And over time, I became more and more bitter about what was going on. I was someone who not only organized these poll workers, but I really helped build a cadre of Republican election lawyers that the party could look to to help ensure the integrity of the elections process. And then to have these people question me, make these awful allegations, and then to not really have my friends stand up for me at all, I became very bitter. And then you compound that with the death threats that we dealt with as a family. I found myself, and I didn't even realize it was going on. But my wife made it very clear to me that I was losing who I was. I was distracted. I was bitter. I was not the man, the husband, and the father that I had once been.

And then, as COVID restrictions came down, I started to attend more and more events with people like the former President of the Senate, Karen Fane, who was a friend of mine who I had worked with on many issues. But now I had been dealing with her as someone suggesting that my colleagues here and the elections workers in Maricole County and I were violating the law. We were engaging in election fraud. And so I'd go to these events. I couldn't even go up and talk to her, but I'd be in side groups, and I would become enraged. And that was not me. That's not me. I was always noticed the level-headed guy. That's what I think people liked about me. I wasn't that level-headed guy anymore. I had so much hate and anger. And then it really all came to a head in 2022. One of my colleagues here, our county attorney, Alistair Adele, she tragically passed away. And so I was at her funeral. I spoke at her funeral.

She's quite young and she was under a lot of pressure herself for other reasons.

Absolutely. And so I went to the reception after that funeral and saw many of my Republican allies who I hadn't seen in person in quite a while. One of them, in particular, one of my fellow Republican election lawyers, I started to talk to him about it. He said, I just find all this stuff, this alleged election fraudal, all just very boring and something. It just lit a fire inside of me. My wife was with me, and she grabbed me by the arm and said, You got to stop this. You need to go to therapy. I don't know who you are. I don't know this man standing in front of me. And so within a week, I was in therapy. Never gone to therapy before. And we know the stories, particularly as men. We're told, Suck it up. Rub some dirt on it, and move on. Particularly an elected official, viewed as a sign of weakness. What's wrong with you? Is there something wrong?

Character defect. Yeah.

Yes. And so I did it, but I did it online, right? I wasn't going to necessarily go out and march into a psychologist's office, but I did it online because I felt comfortable with it. And wow, what a difference. What a difference it made for me. I didn't realize how much I needed this. And to hear from my therapist that I had PTSD, which I winced at. I'm like, I don't have PTSD. This is politics, right? First responders have PTSD, veterans, Vietnam veterans, veterans of the wars in the Middle East. This wasn't PTSD. But for the first time, I heard someone tell me that. And in some ways, it gave me peace that this is tough what I'm dealing with, this trauma, and I need to accept that and start to address it.

And you've made progress, obviously. And has your family healed some from this as a result of what you've done?

Yes, most definitely. So this was earlier in 2022, and I'm very happy that I had gone to therapy because as you alluded to, in the 2020 election in November 2022, there's really the eyes of the world on us here in Maricopa County. But as a family, we've spoken so openly about this. And I give my wife great credit for that because that's the type of mom she is, that's the type of wife she is. And so we have done a lot of healing. It's an ongoing process, of course, as a family. But I'm so proud of my wife and our daughters for supporting me, telling me, reminding me, Dad, there's no shame in this at all. So not only was I willing to take it on, but then instead, going out and talking about it. I love sports. I have a big Phoenix Suns fan. And so the way that I've tried to look at it, it's like, hey, Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, they got to get ready for the big game, right? So maybe either they have a sports therapist or they need to work with the trainer. And it's the same way here.

This helped me to get ready for these big moments, like in November of '22, when we had the eyes of the world on us, because people don't want to see their elections official as someone who's get out losing their temper, but instead, as someone who's ready to defend the elections workers, but also to go out there and tell the truth when something like we had the challenges with the tabulators that it was going to be all right, and here's how you can still ensure that your vote is counted. By the way everyone's vote was counted and no one was disenfranchised.

There are some things you said that were so important, but I just want to underscore the importance of recognizing that we're all subject to mental illness. We're all subject to these moments of stress and anxiety that can be really distorting and destructive, and it is not a weakness of character to get some help. It's important to get help to sort these issues out and to find the light. So good for you and doing that. And I hope everyone who's listening will think about that example because so many people could benefit who don't and ultimately find themselves in tragic circumstances. So I appreciate that. I want to ask you two things before we go. One is about others who are thinking of running for public office. They'll hear your story, and the question is, why should I subject myself to this? Politics has become so ugly. Social media, polarization. You try and do the right thing, you become a target. As someone who believes deeply in democracy, what is your honest answer to these folks?

So my honest answer to that would be that you need to understand it's not easy that you could very well be subjected to these challenges, these threats, even at the local level. But I can tell them if they care about this country, if they care about our Democratic Republic, there's nothing like having the opportunity to be there in a moment where a lot is on the line. And there's no other way I can imagine that you can learn more about yourself and what you're made of than be in those positions. No matter what the history books say about this time, I know what I did. I know what my colleagues did in this difficult time. And all of this money and personal prestige that you might get from a job in the private sector. There's nothing like serving your country, serving your community. And if all of us who care deeply about this decide to check out, we know who will be left in these positions. And that concerns me. I'm taking a break. I'm taking a break at the end of 2024. But I absolutely intend to continue to serve my community. I don't know what that role will be, but I just want people to know for those of us who decide not to run again, it doesn't mean we're quitting.

It doesn't mean we're giving up. We have to take a break sometimes, too. But I encourage those people who are interested in running for office do it. There's nothing more rewarding than public service.

And here's a related question that I think is really important as we look forward to another potentially combustible presidential election just around the corner. You read stories from around the country about election workers who are frankly intimidated and concerned for their safety and their reputations and their being recruitment problems for election workers. And you also see stories about election deniers seizing the election machinery in counties around the country. How concerned are you about that and about the integrity of the next election? Not because the system is inherently corrupt or corruptible, but because good people are afraid to participate as election officials, and because election deniers are grabbing the wheel.

So I always want to be very careful about labeling people who might be interested in serving in elections. We need to have everyone working in elections, regardless of what their political views may be. So I think that's very important, not only because we need to have folks from both parties, eyeballs, and that's very important to the process. But also, I've had an experience where people have come in the doors or it's inevidence that they're systemic fraud. As they learn more, they come to learn that it's not, and they can be evangelists for this. So we've seen some of that. But do I have concerns about 2024? Absolutely. I know that we've seen this in some other counties and other states where people who have run on almost this platform of trying to put their finger on the scale have been elected. But in the end, because there are so many different eyeballs on the system, I've got confidence. The other thing that we're doing here in Marcopa County is we're doing table-top exercises for insider threats. We're very much focused on that. We have 24-hour, 24-7, live-stream cameras on our election facilities. So that should give confidence to those who, on the right and the left, who think that there's funny business going on.

But we will continue to watch these things very carefully. I know that that needs to happen across the board. But the other thing maybe to end on an optimistic tone is that, as we know, there are some people who decided not to participate in elections as workers because of fears. I've also met people, particularly young people, who've come up to me and they said they've been inspired now by what they've seen to pursue a career in elections administration. I can tell you, 10 or 20 years ago, that didn't happen. You go to these elections conferences and pretty much everyone he asked, How did you end up in elections? They're like, It was an accident. I don't know how I ended up, but I love it. And now those same people, the folks who become first responders who run into burning buildings like we saw in 9/11, we're starting to see some of those people who are actually inspired to pursue a career in elections administration. So that gives me hope.

That's a great optimistic note to stop on. And look, I say it all the time, democracy is an ongoing battle between hope and cynicism, and you can't surrender to cynicism. And you did not, Bill Gates, and you deserve great respect and gratitude for that. You certainly have mine, and I appreciate spending this time with you.

Well, thank you so much, David. Really wonderful to share the story. Thank you for taking the time to have me join you today. Thank you for listening to The Ax Files, brought to you by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Fender-Anenberg. The show is also produced by Jeff Fox and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN. For more programming from the IOP, visit politics. Uchicago. Edu.

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