It’s a convoluted tale to be sure but the gist is that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders ostensibly bought a $20,000 podium from a pal and seems to be desperately doing everything she can to cover up the details from inquiring minds. And we’re not even sure she really spent the 20 grand on a podium.

Josh Marshall has a good ‘splainer of what has the stink of something rotten in Little Rock. It all began when Huckabee Sanders went to Paris as part of a trade delegation:

There’s a guy in Arkansas named Matt Campbell, a lawyer/blogger who seems to have mad FOIA skills. He publishes a blog called the Blue Hog Report. And save that link since this story almost entirely goes back to his on-going sleuthing. Campbell files a Freedom of Information Act request for the expense records for the trip. But what he gets back is very limited due to a law that allows the governor’s office to make exemptions to the state FOIA law. Campbell points out that these exemptions are only for security issues and it’s not at all clear why expense reports from a trade trip to Paris need to be withheld for the governor’s security. So now Campbell sues to get the records. Two days after Campbell sues Sanders calls a special session of the state legislature for, among other things, a dramatic revision of the state’s FOIA law.

Hmmm.

Arkansas is a pretty Republican state at this point. But the FOIA changes are too big a pill for even state Republicans to swallow. A more limited reform is eventually passed. But at this point Sanders has made a pretty big story about what seems like a gadfly blogger just trying to go through some expense reports.

Eventually Campbell gets the documents. But there’s something weird. The governor’s office paid almost $20,000 for a podium it purchased from a company called Beckett Events, LLC. No one has seen the new podium and there seem to be all sorts of irregularities tied to how the thing was expensed.

There’s a lot more to this bizarre story, though no one seems to have gotten to the bottom of it yet. We don’t even know for sure if there was any actual wrongdoing. However, Marshall provides two more suspicious details. One is that Becket Events is owned by a Republican named Virginia Beckett who was in Paris at the same time as Sanders. The other is that when the governor’s office finally released a photo of this wildly expensive podium, it looked identical to the one Sanders used at her inauguration – which Beckett served as a consultant for.

One other detail that may or may not be relevant is that Beckett and a pal who was also in Paris with her both received subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee.

So what's Huckabee Sanders trying to hide and why? Stay tuned!