On Saturday, July 18, 2026, Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested in Miami. They are being held in federal custody while the United Kingdom asks for them to be sent over to stand trial.

The next day, British prosecutors spelled out exactly what the brothers are accused of. The Crown Prosecution Service announced additional charges against both men: for Andrew Tate, "seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and 19 additional charges for offences relating to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography." For Tristan Tate, "one count of sexual assault, two counts of rape and three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation."

Added to charges already on file, that comes to 59 counts between them, involving seven women, over conduct alleged between 2010 and 2017.

Then Arizona's congressman for the 8th District weighed in — on the brothers' side.

What Hamadeh actually said

Abraham Hamadeh posted this:

"The Tate brothers are American citizens and so they deserve full American Constitutional protections — which means innocent until proven guilty. No American court has charged them with a crime despite years of false alarms and innuendos. They've been deplatformed, debanked, arrested, and still no convictions — something President Trump has endured for years. There should be no extradition of American citizens when the charges are unclear and political. The US government should either charge them with a crime or protect them from reckless court proceedings in the UK and Romania."

Read that last sentence again. A sitting member of Congress is asking the United States government to step in and stop two men from facing a rape and trafficking trial.

His office did not answer questions from the Phoenix New Times about it.

"Unclear and political" is not what the record shows

Hamadeh's whole argument rests on the idea that nobody can say what these men are accused of. But the Crown Prosecution Service put it in writing, count by count, with the number of complaining witnesses and the years the conduct is alleged to have happened. There is nothing unclear about it.

"Political" doesn't hold up either. These are ordinary criminal charges brought by career prosecutors in a country with its own courts and its own jury trials — the same system Americans have relied on for centuries. And Romania, which Hamadeh also names, has its own separate case: Romanian prosecutors indicted the brothers for forming an organized criminal group and trafficking women between countries, with rape allegations attached. Investigators identified women who say the brothers tricked them into appearing in porn videos and kept them at a compound.

His claim that "no American court has charged them with a crime" is true and beside the point. The crimes are alleged to have happened in Britain and Romania. That's where they'd be tried. Hamadeh isn't describing a gap in the evidence — he's describing the map.

He used to be a prosecutor. He ran to be Arizona's top one.

This is the part his constituents should sit with.

Hamadeh spent a few years prosecuting low-level crimes at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office. In 2022 he ran for Arizona Attorney General — the job of being the state's chief law enforcement officer, the person who backs prosecutors and stands with crime victims. He lost that race by 280 votes.

A man who wanted that job is now telling the federal government to shield two defendants from a prosecution. Not to monitor it. Not to make sure they get lawyers. To stop it.

And "innocent until proven guilty" is a rule about how courts must treat defendants. It is not a rule that says defendants never have to go to court. Hamadeh, of all people, knows the difference.

This wasn't a one-time slip

Hamadeh has been in the Tate brothers' corner for over a year. In June 2025 he shared a post from Tristan Tate — at a time when Tristan Tate was already facing 11 British charges including rape, human trafficking and assault, plus the Romanian indictment.

So the July 2026 statement wasn't a reflex. It was a position he'd already taken, restated at the moment the men were actually in custody.

The due process he demands for them, he denied to Arizona

Hamadeh's post is a lecture about respecting legal outcomes. His own record is the opposite.

After losing the 2022 Attorney General's race, Hamadeh filed lawsuit after lawsuit trying to overturn it. He lost every time. The Arizona Supreme Court sanctioned Hamadeh and the Republican National Committee for "misrepresenting facts to the court" and ordered him to pay more than $55,000 toward the legal bills of Kris Mayes and Adrian Fontes. One judge noted that when Hamadeh claimed election workers had cost him the race, only 14 ballots were put in as evidence — and those showed mistakes by voters, not officials.

So: courts he loses in are rigged. Courts that might convict two men accused of rape and trafficking are "reckless." There's a pattern there, and it isn't about principle.

Why this matters in Arizona's 8th District

Nobody in Arizona's 8th District asked their congressman to spend his time on this. Hamadeh has never held an in-person town hall — more than 200 constituents showed up to one he refused to schedule, and he didn't come. He won't sit in a room with the people who elected him. He will go online to defend two men facing 59 sex-crime charges.

And he keeps choosing the men over the victims. In November 2025, as the House fought over releasing the government's Jeffrey Epstein records, the Arizona Mirror reported that Hamadeh was one of four Arizona Republicans who had "stayed quiet on the issue, even after repeated protests outside of Schweikert and Hamadeh's offices demanding the files be released." That's the same instinct at work — and it's an instinct we've documented across the party, from a senator who voted to keep the Epstein files sealed and then took checks from two men named in them to a congressman who was one of only two votes against protecting people whose naked images get posted online.

There's one more detail from the same Phoenix New Times report worth keeping in mind about how carefully Hamadeh reads before he posts: he came out publicly for putting the country on year-round daylight saving time, apparently not realizing Arizona already stays on standard time all year.

He is not a careful man. He is a loud one. And when it counted, the people he chose to be loud for were Andrew and Tristan Tate.

We deserve better.

Source

Hamadeh goes to bat for infamous accused rapists Andrew and Tristan Tate — Zach Buchanan, Phoenix New Times, July 21, 2026. Photo: Phoenix New Times.