NEWS | POLITICS
Former Spokane Republican Party Chair Stephanie Cates says Standow played different sides of the party against each other — until he angered too many people. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
“THE WITNESS,” CONTINUED... them to agree to an internal detente. No Republican-onRepublican attacks. Standow even floated the idea of Knezovich and Shea making a show of unity by standing together in a video to promote Second Amendment rights. It didn’t happen. The meetings with Knezovich, Standow says, eventually made him suspect in the eyes of Shea and some of his allies. To them, Knezovich is a Democrat and a traitor. But Miles, the party’s state committeewoman, says Standow was like a “bull in a china shop,” unfamiliar with the factions’ complicated history of grievances. “I could put two of them in the room and they’d stab each other in the back the next morning,” Standow says about the factions. “It’s like Spy vs. Spy. They’re always determined to get each other.” The internal battles weren’t just over ideology: They were over transparency and financial responsibility. Spokane Republican Party district leaders asked for bank statements in 2017, Miles says, but were rebuffed by the leadership. The party was long overdue for its bylaw-mandated twice-yearly audit. But the audits didn’t happen at all that year. And then, in the fall of 2017, the county GOP is hit with a campaign finance lawsuit alleging “fifty-seven apparent violations of various provisions of Washington’s campaign finance law.” When Standow received the email informing the party of the lawsuit threat, he forwarded it to Wright and tipped off Miles before informing Stephanie Cates, the chair of the party. He says he was worried party leaders would try to bury it. Cates wasn’t happy. “Should have been forwarded to me and me only,” Cates later writes to Standow. Combine the settlement, legal fees, and the legal retainer and the bill tops $11,300 — among the party’s biggest expenditures of the year. But it’s kept quiet. Cates says there wasn’t a formal announcement, leaving it up to district leaders to communicate the news to the party. “I didn’t think an email blast was appropriate,” Cates says. “I didn’t think we needed to shout to the rest of the world.”
20 INLANDER AUGUST 30, 2018
Even today, several of the precinct committee officers called by the Inlander had only a vague idea the party had been sued. “[The party leaders’] reasoning is they didn’t want to make us look bad,” Miles says. “For the love of God, what do you think it looks like now?” In April 2018, Miles pushed the board to “freeze all assets and expenditures” for a month, create an audit committee and conduct a full-scale audit of the party finances. Cates, exhausted and stretched thin with work, resigned as chair at the same meeting. But the controversy over Cates’ tenure wasn’t over. The board discovered that Cates had taken a slew of Marriott Rewards points, accumulated for the Spokane GOP’s big spending at the Davenport Grand for the 2017 Lincoln Day Dinner, without telling anyone. Some board members were furious. Leonard Christian, candidate for county assessor, wanted to call the police. Instead, the controversy was handled internally. Cates says she used about $300 worth of the rewards points for two nights at Marriott hotels on the west side on party business. Cates remains unapologetic, pointing to the thousands of dollars she’d personally donated to the party. “For anyone to suggest that I personally profited from being the chair of the GOP is laughable,” Cates says. “I gave four years of my life to the party at great personal cost. … The only decision I regret is not thoroughly vetting Brian Standow.”
THE ALLSUP HEADS-UP
This summer, the party was beginning to put all that messy past behind them. In a show of unity, members of the establishment wing of the party, like Miles and Knezovich, had agreed to set aside their differences to support Wright, of the Liberty Caucus wing, for party chair. Wright’s background in banking was a major asset, Miles says. Their finances were on solid ground. But then, at the 2018 Lincoln Day Dinner, white
supremacist James Allsup shows up, a guest of his girlfriend, Abigail Osborne, herself a district leader within the Spokane GOP. Just a few days later, the news breaks that Allsup has been elected to a precinct committee officer position in Whitman County. The party scrambles to distance themselves. Wright sends out a message — ghost-written by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ team, according to Wright’s husband — condemning the alt-right figure. But in July, word starts to get around that Wright and John Charleston’s conservative group, the Northwest Grassroots, was going to be hosting a secret, special guest for their July 11 movie night. At a gathering of Republicans at Jack & Dan’s Bar and Grill days before the event, Standow begins needling Charleston, trying to get him to spill the beans. “He likes to know everything,” Charleston says. “So he can be a bee buzzing around and telling everything.” Standow makes a guess: It’s James Allsup, isn’t it? Finally, Charleston admits it. It’s Allsup. Standow tells one person about it: Knezovich. “I thought, if anyone could have stopped them, I thought Ozzie could have called them and put an end to it,” Standow says. That didn’t happen. And when, two weeks after the movie night, media outlets report that Wright had hosted and defended a white supremacist, all hell breaks loose. When the Spokesman-Review reveals that Standow was the one who alerted Knezovich, Standow says, it shatters the party’s fragile new sense of unity. It destroys his relationship with Wright and Charleston. The Liberty Caucus crowd is furious. “They crucified me for telling Ozzie,” Standow says. “They believe this is all Ozzie’s fault.” Wright resigns. Several other party leaders, like longtime Knezovich critic Vitaliy Maksimov and Abigail Osborne, now Allsup’s fiancee, resign for other reasons. Standow resigns shortly after. “It proved impossible being friends with both sides of the factions,” Standow lamented in his resignation letter. And in the ensuing Facebook fights that explode across the local GOP, Standow makes another public admission: He was the one who’d told Knezovich about the alleged threat from Maclay. In a series of text messages, Maclay confronts Standow, comparing him to some of his other enemies who’ve spoken with the sheriff, like his ex-wife. “Is the Sheriff playing you just like these other whack jobs?” Maclay writes to Standow. “What makes you think you’re special? You now have no political future. Just like all of them Brian.” Standow adds an alarm to his house, concerned for his family’s safety. Already, Standow’s reputation is under attack from Maclay’s allies. He knows they might not only dredge up the dismissed domestic violence charges, but also his bankruptcy, a brief divorce filing and medication-linked mental health breakdowns. For many of his former political allies, Standow isn’t seen as a whistleblower fighting for transparency. He’s a warhound or a shit-stirring saboteur. “During this time of year, with the white supremacist stuff fresh in people’s minds, we might as well hand the election to [McMorris Rodgers’ opponent] Lisa Brown,” Miles wrote to Standow after learning he’d spoken to the Inlander. “I won’t air dirty laundry to the whole world.” But Standow says he was just sick of all the games, all the infighting and cover-up and conflict. Maybe the party will have to lose seats, he muses, before it can truly unite. “I got caught up in a shooting. Got caught up with the patriot group. Got caught up in conflict with the establishment,” Standow says. “All because I wanted to do what I thought was right.” n danielw@inlander.com