Defeated Republican candidate Kari Lake has rejoiced in the news that her former Democratic rival, Arizona’s Gov. Katie Hobbs, has just lost her chief of staff, who resigned her post effective immediately on Thursday.
“Everyone close to @katiehobbs is fleeing as fast as they can,” Lake tweeted on Thursday. “Hobbs is a disaster. She’s a sinking ship. I just hope she doesn’t take our state down with her,” she added.
News that Hobbs’ chief of staff, Allie Bones, was stepping down from her role was given by the Governor’s Office on Thursday. Before becoming chief of staff, Bones served as assistant secretary of state for four years, always working alongside Hobbs.
“Allie Bones exemplifies the true meaning of a public servant, and I am incredibly grateful for her leadership throughout the transition and this first legislative session of my Administration,” the Arizona governor said in a statement. “Her goal was to build a team that could work across the aisle to navigate divided government, and she accomplished that.”
The statement didn’t mention the exact reason why Bones resigned her post, saying that the former chief of staff would “pursue new opportunities” and that a new chief of staff would be named next week. Hobbs said she wished Bones “nothing but the best.”
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Bones is the fourth of Hobbs’ top advisers to resign within the first six months of the Democratic governor’s administration. In March, the governor asked press secretary Josselyn Berry to resign over a controversy born out of a social media post where the spokesperson incited gun violence hours after the deadly shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee, school.
Berry’s post suggested the use of violence against those disparaging transgender people after news that the Nashville shooter was trans. “Us when we see transphobes,” Berry tweeted, sharing an image from the 1980 film Gloria showing a woman with handguns in her hands.
The tweet prompted a backlash and led to Hobbs asking Berry to resign. Later that same week, Hobbs’ director of communications Murphy Hebert—who had worked with Hobbs while she was still secretary of state—was also dismissed.
At the time, Bones said that Hebert’s departure was a mutual decision, saying that they were “working through where she best fits in the organization” outside of the Governor’s Office.
Hebert’s departure came at the same time as a restructuring among Hobbs’ two other top advisers. Bones had minimized the importance of these shifts less than three months in Hobbs’ administration, saying that it was a normal process of re-evaluation.
“We’ve hired somewhere between 40 and 50 people in the beginning of this administration. That’s a lot of people, and you kind of need to evaluate and assess as you go along and figure out, how are we best working together and maximizing this team?” she said in March. “And we see this as the best maximization of everyone and where their strengths are.”
Meanwhile, Lake’s efforts to overturn the result of the state’s latest gubernatorial election have received another setback this week, when her last-remaining claim was dismissed in court on Monday.
The defeated Republican nominee, who lost to Hobbs by over 17,000 votes, now plans to take her case up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Newsweek has contacted Kari Lake’s and Katie Hobbs’ teams for comment by email.