A mystery company, a MAGA activist and $1.1M: Inside Risa Lombardo’s ‘sham’ Green Party candidacy

Risa Lombardo, a former local GOP official who is accused of being a sham Green Party candidate for Arizona governor, spent 78% of her public campaign funding to pay a single Nevada business that was created 13 days before her first payment to it.

And those payments could constitute major violations of Arizona’s public campaign finance system, which has strict rules for candidates who use taxpayer money to run for elected office.

Lombardo’s candidacy is already controversial: The Arizona Green Party is telling its members not to vote for her because she is a “sham” candidate running under the party’s banner. Lombardo was an elected Republican Precinct Committeewoman — a post typically held by the most committed party activists — until days before she filed to run as a Green Party candidate last year, and she was selling MAGA merch and supporting far-right candidates like Kari Lake in 2023.

In a tight race between Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Republican nominee, votes for a third-party candidate could swing the outcome. With Green Party candidates typically appealing to liberal or left-of-center voters who don’t like the Democratic Party’s nominee, that could mean fewer ballots cast for Hobbs.

In June, Lombardo’s campaign paid more than $887,000 to Bootstrap Campaigns for a wide range of services. Her campaign finance report says her payments to the firm were for consulting services, mailers, text messages to voters, flyers, photography, video production, radio production, canvassing, social media management, petition gathering and sign printing and installation.

It’s unclear what petition gathering services Bootstrap Campaigns conducted, since Lombardo’s signatures to make the ballot were gathered months prior to her payments to the business. Clean Elections candidates are barred from incurring debt. In 2009, the Clean Elections Commission removed a GOP legislator from office for, among other things, spending money that he did not have in his campaign account.

Lombardo’s nominating petitions were submitted in May, several weeks before she paid Bootstrap Campaigns for petition gathering — and before the company was even incorporated.

The Lombardo campaign sent out mass texts and mailers to Arizona voters last month, asking them to change their registration to Green Party and to vote for her in the July 21 primary election. In the primary, Lombardo is up against the candidates that the Arizona Green Party endorsed, but because she collected enough voter signatures, Lombardo’s name will be printed on the ballot, while the party’s candidates are running as write-ins. 

After collecting more than $21,000 in $5 qualifying contributions, Lombardo received $1.1 million in public campaign funds from the Citizens Clean Election Commission on May 26. 

Bootstrap Campaigns has no online footprint, there are no Arizona or federal campaign finance reports of it receiving any payments from any candidate except for Lombardo. All of the company’s officer positions are listed as being held by a Christopher Silva. The company has no website or online footprint, and attempts to identify Silva were unsuccessful.

Lombardo’s massive lump-sum payments to a single firm seemingly violate the rules Clean Elections imposes on candidates who use its money to run for office, as well as the state law that created the public campaign finance program.

Arizona law requires Clean Election candidates to “pay monies from a participating candidate’s campaign account directly to the person providing goods or services to the campaign and shall identify … the full name and street address of the person and the nature of the goods and services and compensation for which payment has been made.”

Further, Clean Elections rules regarding that law, which are found in the Arizona Administrative Code, says that a candidate’s campaign finance report must include the same details for subcontractors it pays, even if those payments are made through another vendor.

If the Clean Elections Commission finds that a candidate violated state law or the commission’s rules, it can decertify a candidate, suspend funding or order it to be repaid, or impose an up to $5,000 penalty for candidates for statewide office. 

That isn’t how Lombardo reported her spending. Instead, all of her money was paid directly to Bootstrap Campaigns, with payments noted as paying for a litany of services. 

If Bootstrap Campaigns actually performed such varied work, it would be highly unusual. Large campaign management firms with decades of experience rarely do all of those different tasks in-house, and instead typically hire subcontractors to do much of the work — like photography, video production and sign printing —  that Lombardo’s campaign paid Bootstrap Campaigns to complete.

Lombardo paid at least one other company in a similar way. A $30,000 payment to Hunt On Consulting notes that it was for consulting, fieldwork, event support and voter engagement, logistics, photography and communications. 

Hunt On Consulting is based in Sheridan, Wyoming, and has the same address as hundreds of thousands of other businesses that use commercial registered agents at that address. 

Some of those businesses are legitimate, but many of them are not, and reports of scammers using that address and Registered Agents Inc., the same firm as Hunt on Consulting, are numerous. In Wyoming, the owners of limited liability companies are not required to identify themselves on incorporation filings, and the state doesn’t collect corporate or personal income taxes, making it a haven for foreign shell companies and any company that wants to hide its ownership.

Some of Lombardo’s campaign spending went to firms that are clearly part of the Republican campaign machine. For instance, she paid $50,000 to Tucson-based Gigs AZ, which is operated by Jose Acuna, who works for the Arizona  Republican Party.

Acuna did not respond to a phone message. 

The AZGOP paid Acuna $1,930 in June, according to a campaign finance report that lists the same address for Acuna as the one listed for Gigs AZ in Lombardo’s campaign report.

And Lombardo paid $3,000 to Financial and Treasury Services, LLC, which was created on May 30, and whose principal agent is Tim Sifert, a former communications director for the Arizona Republican Party.

Sifert, who runs the American Campaign Finance Foundation, is a longtime GOP consultant. He serves as the treasurer for numerous Republican campaigns, including Local Majority PAC, which supports conservative candidates, Arizona Rep. Matt Gress, Rodney Glassman, who is running for attorney general and Arizona Rep. Justin Olson, an employee of Turning Point USA.

When Lombardo faced legal challenges to the voter signatures she gathered to make it on the ballot, she was represented by Republican election attorneys Tim La Sota and Kory Langhofer, whose past clients have included Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Arizona Republican Party. 

Lombardo’s campaign paid La Sota $4,415 on June 24 for legal services, but her campaign finance report does not list any payments to Langhofer or to Statecraft, his law firm. 

Lombardo did not respond to multiple messages from the Arizona Mirror asking about her campaign’s work with Republican-affiliated businesses and her campaign finance reporting. 

Despite her deep ties to the Arizona Republican Party, Lombardo told the Mirror in April that her candidacy was sincere and that she switched to the Green Party because its platform best reflects her principles.

Lombardo was elected as a Republican Precinct Committeeman for Legislative District 2 in July 2024, alongside her husband, Michael Lombardo. She served as a precinct committeewoman, a position that is typically held by people who are highly involved in partisan politics, from October 2024 until at least Feb. 28, 2025.

Michael Lombardo is still a member of the executive board of the Legislative District 2 Republican Committee. Risa Lombardo said in April that the two had divorced, but the Mirror couldn’t find any records of that. 

When he made a $104 donation to the Arizona Republican Party in May, Michael Lombardo listed the same residential address, in the same lot of a north Phoenix mobile home park, that Risa Lombardo is using for her campaign. 

Beyond serving as a precinct committeeman, campaign finance reports show that the Legislative District 2 Republican Committee paid Lombardo $404 in 2025 for postage to send certified letters to precinct committeemen.

The Green Party is no stranger to Republicans co-opting its name to run candidates aimed at siphoning votes away from Democrats in tight races. The tactic doesn’t always work, but in 2008, Democratic state Rep. Jackie Thrasher said she believed a Green Party candidate who received donations from her Republican opponents led to her losing a reelection bid.

And in 2010, a former Republican legislator recruited unhoused people and street performers to run as Green Party candidates, admitting that those candidates might take votes that otherwise would have gone to Democrats. 

As of January, about 36% of Arizona’s voters were registered as Republicans, 28% were registered Democrats and 34% were unaffiliated. Democrats need those unaffiliated voters to win, and any third party candidate who takes votes that otherwise would have gone to Democrats could make or break a campaign. 

The Arizona Green Party is working to inform its voters that Lombardo isn’t a legitimate candidate, but the party has limited means to do so. 

“We don’t have a tremendous number of volunteers and have limited funds,” Jon Ralston, Arizona Green Party recorder and candidate for secretary of state, told the Mirror. 

One of its main communication efforts has been sending post cards to all registered Green Party voters in the state calling both Risa Lombardo and Duwayne Collier, who is running for secretary of state, “fraud” candidates.

The postcards instead instruct voters to vote for write-in candidates that the Green Party actually endorses: Carlos Melendez for governor, Ralston for secretary of state and Mike Cease for corporation commissioner. 

None of those candidates gathered enough signatures to be placed on the Green Party primary ballot. 

“These ‘sham candidate’ tactics are a predictable outcome of the system created by the Republican and Democratic parties,” the Arizona Green Party wrote in a June statement. “Political operatives are incentivized to use third-party ballot lines to split the vote and benefit their preferred candidates.”

Ralston said that he is regularly fielding calls from Green Party voters who are confused about who to vote for in the primary election to represent the party’s platform. 

On its website, the Arizona Green Party says it supports phasing out the use of fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy, a transition to an eco-socialist economy, eliminating poverty, ending police brutality and mass incarceration, shrinking the military-industrial complex and promoting free and fair elections. 

Those are a far cry from the policies of politicians Lombardo has supported in the past, including President Donald Trump, who used the refrain “drill, baby, drill” to describe his enthusiasm for fossil fuels and who attempted to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency. 

The Arizona Green Party is also using its social media account, and its candidates are using their personal accounts, to inform voters that they don’t support Lombardo and Collier.

Ralston said he wasn’t surprised that Lombardo’s campaign was working with several Republican Party-affiliated businesses. 

“It demonstrates that she’s a fraud, sham candidate,” he said. “It’s not the first time we’ve had to put up with it from Republicans or Democrats.”