Conservative Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu, a well-known border hawk, revealed more details on Monday about his longtime romance with a Mexican immigrant who is now accusing the sheriff of threatening to deport him if their relationship ever became public.
Babeu told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he dated the man, who has only been identified as “Jose,” for three years. He also repeated his accusation that the man committed crimes against him after their relationship soured.
Here’s a rush transcript from the CNN interview:
We had seen each other privately and for some time, close to three years, simply in dating. And he had volunteered separately on my campaign and in an unpaid status. Actually was in control of our website. Just a volunteer website for sheriff for my political campaign. I also started a twitter accounts and did the social media. And how this all started, wolf, and I showed you some documents ahead of time is back back in april or may of last year, we turned it over as we were growing our campaign, to a paid professional. And he turned all that over and then, six or eight months later, he then, because he still had the passwords took control of that information, started to tweet and people talk about somebody tweeted and they lied about it later. This is the truth. That he tweeted and he also took property not only of all my photographs of our financial donations, all of that, and started to post very negative things about me, posing as me. The only communication my attorney had — everybody is saying this is deportation — one, he’s legal. He has said that. I’ve said that. And then, in addition, this whole thing about deportation, we all know I don’t have deportation authority. I have the authority to arrest. There were several crimes committed here against me and my campaign.
