Back in late October, the office of Katie Hobbs, the Democrat candidate in the Arizona gubernatorial race, was broken into and items were stolen from it.
Following the burglary, Katie Hobbs’ campaign manager blamed the Trump-backed GOP challenger in the race, Kari Lake, for the break-in, saying that the Lake campaign was “spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit.” In her words:
“Let’s be clear: for nearly two years Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit. The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation. It won’t work. Katie is running for governor to ensure the safety and security of every Arizona family. She will win this race.”
Katie Hobbs herself also pushed that narrative about Lake being behind the incident, sharing the statement on Twitter:
Statement from our campaign on tonight's news: pic.twitter.com/OLqPMa5pYt
— Katie Hobbs (@katiehobbs) October 27, 2022
Turns out, however, it wasn’t some right-wing radical that broke into the Hobbs campaign office. Rather, it was an illegal immigrant from Portugal who an ICE spokesperson said is “currently at-large for administrative immigration violations for failing to maintain his status as a registered student at an academic institution.”
Fox News Digital, adding more details about the illegal immigrant who allegedly committed the burglary, reported that:
"*" indicates required fields
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to Fox News that 36-year-old Daniel Mota Dos Reis is a citizen of Portugal who came to the U.S. as a registered student in 2018 and is now violating “the terms of his admission.”
[…]Police arrested Mota on Oct. 27 and charged him in connection to the Hobbs campaign headquarters break-in. He was released on bond before an immigration detainer was issued, ICE said.
Lake, after being blamed for the attack, pushed back hard on the narrative promulgated by the Hobbs campaign, telling a CNN reporter:
“And are you guys buying that? Are you really buying that? Because this sounds like a Jussie Smollett part two.”
Continuing, Lake also mocked the media for buying the story and accused Hobbs of defaming her in insinuating that she’s to blame for the break-in, saying:
“You’re letting a woman who has been running a terrible campaign direct you to a story like this? You know she is running a bad campaign.
“I can’t believe she would blame my amazing people, blame me for something like that. I don’t even know where her campaign office is. I’m assuming it’s in a basement somewhere because that’s where she’s been campaigning. You guys are despicable for falling into that trap.
“I’m saddened that Hobbs and her camp would try to pin this on us. It’s defamatory and it’s wrong. Her own party is attacking her. She is trying to deflect her abysmal campaign.”
She also, when confronting the mainstream media over the narrative about the burglary that many of them were pushing at the time, accused the MSM outlets of being propagandists for the Democratic party and blindly doing whatever the Democrats say to do.