The Bulwark: Andy Biggs Might Be the “Craziest, Most Extreme” Gubernatorial Candidate This Cycle

Bulwark’s Tim Miller: Biggs was “the human shield between the pedophile polygamists and any accountability.”

PHOENIX –  New reporting from the Bulwark is putting a spotlight on Republican gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs, exposing his disturbing record that spans decades: from his role protecting a corrupt pedophile cult to a central role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and much more.

In the video, Miller lays out Biggs’ long and troubling history — a pattern, stretching back decades, of siding with predators over their victims. He details Biggs’ extreme positions, including his push to ban abortion outright, his efforts to enact devastating cuts to Medicaid, and his drive to defund the FBI. He also outlines Biggs’ repeated votes to make life more expensive for Arizona families through tariffs, and his continued refusal to accept the results of Arizona’s own elections.

From protecting predators to attacking democracy itself, the throughline is unmistakable: Andy Biggs is too extreme for Arizona.

Read more below:

Bulwark: Tim Miller Digs Into Andy Biggs’ Record—and Finds Something Disturbing

• Tim Miller: Now we’re coming to I think maybe the most extreme of all. I think that this guy might be the craziest, most extreme of all, and he’s running in a swing state for governor of the state, and that’s a guy named Andy Biggs. He’s a Tea Party congressman that’s been representing a red part of Arizona for a while now. He went really off the deep end, as you’re about to see, after Trump won in 2016.

• Tim Miller: So let’s run through the rap sheet for Andy Biggs. If you’re going to start anywhere with him, you’re going to start with the fact that he was basically one of the key organizers of the riot at the capital on January 6th. 

• Tim Miller: And you don’t have to take my word for it. Ali Alexander- who was kind of this strange right-wing gadfly- was a Kanye West confidant for a minute and then was one of the organizers of the rally at the Capitol. In an interview that he later deleted, he admitted who he plotted the rally with. Let’s watch:

• Ali Alexander: I was the person who came up with the January 6th idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and then-Congressman Andy Biggs. We schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting so that who we couldn’t lobby could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body hearing our loud war from outside.

• Tim Miller: There you go. They came up with the scheme to put maximum pressure on Congress, bringing people there, bringing the Proud Boys. You saw the results of it. So it was Andy Biggs. Paul Gosar is another really far-right congressman from Arizona and then Mo Books from Alabama congressman.

• Tim Miller: They came up with the idea. Donald Trump obviously ends up executing it and sending people to the Capitol and of course there were you know the various groups, the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys that agitated and exacerbated it. But the whole January 6th premise was concocted by Andy Biggs, candidate for governor in Arizona. It wasn’t just like the one little meeting that he had with Ali Alexander. He was planning a bunch of different strategies for overturning the election from the moment Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. And he knew he broke the law. 

• Tim Miller: You know how I know that he knew he broke the law? The January 6th committee found that Biggs was begging Donald Trump for a preemptive pardon because he knew that his behavior could have caught the eye of the Biden DOJ.

• Tim Miller: Among the other things he did in November 2020, he texted Mark Meadows recommending the alternate elector scheme. This was the idea that states should send different electors to the Electoral College that will vote for Trump even if their state had voted for Joe Biden. In December of 2020, Biggs was one of 10 House Republicans who went to a White House meeting. The point of that meeting was to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to certify the results. So, he was part of that plot in December trying to encourage Mike Pence to have the courage. He was ahead of Donald Trump on that.

• Tim Miller: Also in December of 2020, he was pressuring his own governor in Arizona to overturn the results of the election in his state. So, he basically wanted to cancel the votes of the citizens that he now wants to make him governor. In this interview in December 2020, he basically said that then-Arizona Governor Doug Ducey could invalidate the election. Let’s watch a little bit of that.

• Reporter: Do you think that [Ducey] rushed the certification?

• Rep. Andy Biggs: I think that what he did is he failed to- in my opinion- take the appropriate action. There were allegations of improprieties. He could have called this state legislature into a special session to order a forensic audit. He could have done that. It would have been done by now, and he could have still certified if he thought it was appropriate, when you have he wouldn’t meet with Rudy Giuliani and his and his team. He basically won’t meet with the congressional delegation and talk to us. And so it just tells me that he wasn’t interested in trying to determine and validate the election. He could have validated the election by a forensic audit. He could have invalidated the election. He wasn’t interested in doing that. I’m really- I think it’s- highly unfortunate that our governor basically certified knowing that there are questions out there, and oddly and ironically, he did it right in the middle of the hearing.

• Tim Miller: And then on January 5th, 2021, the day before the insurrection, Biggs texted this insane Arizona state legislator named Mark Finchem, asking for him to to prepare a signed letter from members of the legislature to support this alternate elector scheme. He was trying to put pressure on Pence. He was trying to put pressure on all of Congress by sending a mob outside of Congress. He was trying to put pressure on his state’s governor to do what he thought could invalidate the election for some reason. He’s trying to put pressure on state legislators.

• Tim Miller: This is a multi-pronged plan to try to overturn the world’s longest-running democracy. Andy Biggs was at the center of it. Arizona Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who was one of the rare Republicans who stood up for our democracy in 2020, testified before the January 6th committee that Biggs was pressuring him to decertify the election. So, it was a very all of the- above approach for Andy Biggs as he tried to steal the election in 2020 for Donald Trump. And he hasn’t come around on it. There’s no “whoa, insurrection-1 was crazy” answer happening from Andy Biggs. In June 2022, he wrote an op-ed titled, “Questioning the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election is not un-American.” 

• Tim Miller: He expanded his conspiracy theories about the elections to the 2022 midterm, where Kari Lake lost to incumbent Governor Katie Hobbs, who he’s running against now. In July, he was asked if Hobbs legitimately won the election. He refused to say. Also in July, [he was] asked three times about the 2020 election outcome. He told USA Today he wouldn’t be pitted against Trump, who remains wedded to the allegations. As recently as this March, he still wants to do inquiries into the 2020 election. He basically said that he thinks that we need additional investigations to help make sure the elections are done better, whatever that means. I guess it just means that Republicans never lose. So, there is Andy Biggs.

• Tim Miller: This is a competitive category, and I guess he’s probably behind Pillow Man, Mike Lindell, but he is on the Mount Rushmore of election deniers and election thieves, and he wants to become the governor of Arizona. 

• Tim Miller: But it’s not just that. It’s not like he’s just crazy about this one thing. He’s, you know, like your uncle who has one weird obsession. He’s extreme across the board, and he’s been like this for a long time. If you go back to 2013, there was increased interest in Arizona to finally hold the polygamist fundamentalist Mormon group, the FLDS–  you might have seen the Netflix documentaries- people want to hold them accountable for the sexual abuse of minors. If you haven’t seen the documentaries, the long and short of this is the Marshal’s office in these counties were protecting the pedophile polygamists. So, the federal DOJ had to come in. They were investigating. They were still getting blocked by the Marshal’s office. Then a broad bipartisan majority formed in the state legislature in Arizona that was going to strip Colorado City’s Marshal Office of their authority in the case. It passes 52-7 in the House- Republican House. So you know an overwhelming number of Republicans vote for this. Bill goes to the Senate, and Biggs blocks it. 

• Tim Miller: Biggs was, you know, basically the human shield between the pedophile polygamists and any accountability when he was in the state senate in Arizona. So this goes back a long way. Of course, you have you fast forward to this year, and he was among almost all of the Republicans that voted against the release of the Epstein files. When it comes to policies, he is on the far far out of outer edge of the Republican party on a bunch of different issues. 

• Tim Miller: This is one that I am particularly obsessed with. Andy Biggs has said explicitly that he wants to defund the federal police who keep us safe. Let’s watch that.

• Rep. Andy Biggs: You and that’s what you do is you start defunding some of these bad agencies. The FBI, yeah, the DOJ. You use the Homeman rule to defund people who have abused their power.

• Tim Miller: So, Biggs does not want the FBI to prosecute real criminals, child sex traffickers, con artists, drug traffickers. He wants to totally defund the force that investigates and locks up those criminals.  

• Tim Miller: When it comes to gun control,  Biggs says he’s not open to any types of gun restrictions and that we should harden schools and focus on the doors. He said we hide behind doors because they work. Door control does not actually work. A couple of reasons for that. Number one: a lot of the high-powered weaponry we have goes through doors. Number two: when kids leave school, they have to come out the doors. You know, you see how that works? And so, in some of the famous school shootings like Columbine and Parkland, a lot of the students that were murdered were murdered when they left the school and the shooter was waiting for them. So, that speaks to the limits of door control.

• Tim Miller: He’s not very good at economics either. He has been a huge fan of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs that have caused inflation, causing your food prices to go up. He does not believe the tariffs are inflationary, which goes against what every economist and every person that goes to the grocery store thinks and knows.

• Tim Miller: As far as healthcare is concerned, he voted to end the ACA tax credits that raise healthcare costs for about 400,000 Arizonans. He wants to abolish Medicaid altogether. So I guess he just wants poor people in Arizona to fend for themselves. When it comes to health care, he thinks Medicaid is similar to slavery.

• Tim Miller: As far as abortion is concerned, this is what he would want to propose. He wants to ban abortion from the moment of conception. A fertilized egg is a human life. And so that means even if you’re raped, even if there’s incest, like the polygamists, for example, even if the mom is in danger of losing their life, it doesn’t matter. Andy Biggs is going to force you to carry your rapist’s baby to term. 

• Tim Miller: During the Republican primary, another Republican congressman, David Schweikert, said about Biggs that he was associating with antisemites and white supremacists, and that was a problem. He should stop doing that. And in response to that, Biggs invoked Confederate General Robert E. Lee [and] said that he takes the Lee model for ignoring critics and that Lee also just brushed it off when people called him a racist.

• Tim Miller: So I think that Katie Hobbs is going to absolutely crush this guy in the general election, but you know, people have to go out and vote. And I think Republicans running across the country should probably have to answer for the fact that the nominee running for their party in Arizona is somebody that was a key player in trying to end our democracy, has on multiple occasions tried to protect and help cover up for pedophiles. He wants women to have to carry their rapist child to term. He loves tariffs, and he doesn’t want poor people to get health care. That’s not a great slate of policies to say the least. And so if you’re in Arizona, I think you should take that into consideration when deciding what you’re going to do this November.