Kelli Ward, the Arizona chair of the Republican Party, is under the scanner of a House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, US Capitol riots. As part of the investigation, Ward was ordered to submit her phone records from the day before the riots to the committee. 

She challenged the order in a federal court saying that it would be a violation of her First Amendment rights and appealed to put it on hold. However, a federal judge in Phoenix refused her appeal on Friday and said that Ward failed to show that she would suffer irreparable harm if the House committee got access to her phone records.   

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Who is Kelli Ward? 

Kelli Ward is a Republican politician from Arizona known for her staunch support for former president Donald Trump. Since Trump was voted out of office in 2021, Ward has aggressively promoted the claim that the election was stolen from Trump. 

Kelli Ward was born on January 25, 1969, in Fairmont, West Virginia, US. An osteopathic physician by training, Ward’s first stint as a Republican elect came in 2012 when he won the Republican primaries from Arizona’s District 5 and entered the state senate.

Her first bid to enter the US Senate came in 2015 when she resigned from the state senate to contest in the Republican primaries against incumbent John McCain from Maricopa County. However, in the Republican primaries held in August 2016, she lost to McCain by a wide margin. 

She again contested the Republican primaries in 2018, but this time with a lot of preparations. She had announced her plans in October 2016, shortly after her loss to McCain in August. As per a report by the news outlet FiveThirtyEight, she described herself as “a build-the-wall, stop-illegal-immigration Americanist” – in line with the popular Republican agenda. 

However, she was again defeated in the Republican primaries by Martha McSally, who received 52% of the votes from Maricopa County as opposed to Ward’s 28%. 

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She was elected as the chair of the Arizona Republican party in 2019 from a campaign platform supporting Donald Trump’s presidential candidature. She was re-elected to the post again in 2021 by a margin of only 42. 

She is married to Michael Ward, a former Arizona Air National Guard officer, and has two children.