The task force charged with recommending special ethics rules for attorneys who work for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and other public entities across the state will miss its December 2022 report deadline, according to Arizona Supreme Court records.
The Task Force on Ethics Rules Governing the State Attorney General, County Attorneys, and Other Public Lawyers was established by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel in February following high profile ethics complaints filed by the Arizona Board of Regents and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs against Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
Although the task force has met eight times, members requested additional time to prepare its ethics recommendations. As a result, Brutinel recently signed an order setting a new deadline of June 2023.
In Arizona, the attorney general is mandated by statute to provide certain legal advice as well as representation to various state agencies, state officials, and state employees. The same principle applies to the state’s fifteen county attorneys.
Brutinel’s creation of the Public Lawyers Task Force acknowledged there are particular ethical concerns a government lawyer may face when representing a public body, elected official, or even a government employee that other attorneys do not have to address. Similar considerations can arise for private practice attorneys who are retained to provide legal counsel to a government client.
Many of those considerations came to a head in 2020 when Brnovich and his staff attorneys were accused by Hobbs of failing to abide by the Arizona Supreme Court’s Rules of Professional Conduct. In another instance, Brnovich actually sued his own client, the Arizona Board of Regents, who in turn contacted the Arizona State Bar.
The ethics complaints against Brnovich’s staff were dismissed by the State Bar, although the attorney general himself agreed to a diversion resolution. The situation, however, drew renewed attention to the dual ethical obligations government lawyers have, particularly when required by state law to represent a specific client.
Former Maricopa County Attorney and current Justice Bill Montgomery was appointed by Brutinel to chair the task force. Among the issues the members are expected to address are:
the process to follow if a government or public lawyer believes there is a conflict of interest in representing a public client;
how to handle situations in which the government lawyer does not approve of, or cannot ethically fulfill, a specific course of action desired by a client;
how the terms and conditions of legal representation should be documented between an attorney and a government client, and who calls the shots if the client is more than one person.
The operative whose political action committee (PAC) received $27 million from fallen crypto giant FTX also received over $1 million from committees for Senator Mark Kelly and governor-elect Katie Hobbs.
The operative, Dacey Montoya, also served as the treasurer for these committees. Montoya has been behind numerous other political committees and PACs in Arizona and across at least 16 other states. Usually, those committees also pay her consulting firm, The Money Wheel (TMW).
Montoya serves as the treasurer for the Mark Kelly Victory Fund and Mark Kelly For Senate. TMW received over $832,000 from the two committees over the past two years.
Katie Hobbs’ secretary of state and gubernatorial committees paid TMW about $188,500 over the past four years, with the greatest payouts occurring over the last year. Although Montoya wasn’t listed as the treasurer for either of Hobbs’ campaigns, her firm’s email was listed in the contact information.
That combined $1 million doesn’t include payouts from other political action committees (PACs) and political candidates. (Note: AZ Free News discovered that Montoya’s PACs didn’t always file timely reports, so funds like expenditures, income, and TMW funding may be underreported).
Arizona-based PACs or campaign committees that paid TMW: Outlaw Dirty Money, $61,900; Arizona Pipe Trades 469, $54,000; Invest in Phx, $10,700; Rural Arizonans For Accountability, $10,500; Arizonans For a Just Democracy, $5,500; No On Proposition 126 Committee, $1,200; Solutions for Arizona, $500.
Arizona-based PACs that Montoya ran, and how much they paid TMW: Invest in Education, $504,400; Protect Our Future PAC, $134,500; Way to Lead PAC, $67,800; Moms Fed Up, $52,000; Way to Lead State Power Committee, $49,600; Invest in Education Committee, $40,700; Arizonans For Fair Elections, $40,000; Arizona Families First, $38,900; Change for Arizona 2024 PAC, $31,000; Arizonans For Fair Lending, $27,000; Arizona Future Fund, $25,000; Invest in Arizona, $25,000; Guarding Against Pandemics PAC, $16,000; Families United For Freedom, $15,000; Opportunity For Tomorrow, $11,000; Lead the Way 2022, $9,800; Not Our Faith, $9,200; Liftoff PAC, $3,500; E Pluribus PAC, $9,100; Win the West 2020, $3,100; Win Blue 2020, $2,600; Restore Hope, $2,500; Arizona Washington Victory Fund, $1,800; Arizona Maine Victory Fund, $1,800; Arizona New Jersey Victory Fund, $1,800; Kelly, Cisneros, Rouda, Smith Victory Fund, $1,700; Yes For Phx, $1,400; Saguaro Victory Fund, $1,100; and Arizona New Mexico Victory Fund, $800.
Political candidates for whom Montoya served as treasurer, and how much they paid TMW: Mayor Kate Gallego, $76,300; Reginald Bolding, $51,800; and Jevin Hodge, $42,000.
Political candidates whose campaigns paid TMW: Kirsten Engel, $46,900; Judy Stahl, $11,500; Ann Kirkpatrick, $118,500; and Heather Ross, $36,000.
At minimum, Montoya’s firm has made over $2.7 million over the past few years through Arizona political candidates, committees, and PACs.
Montoya also founded and ran an influential PAC that didn’t pay TMW: Will of the People Arizona, a PAC dedicated to defeating Propositions 128, 129, and 132. In their tweets, the PAC tags multiple progressive organizations in their effort, including Pro-Choice Arizona, LUCHA Arizona, Mass Liberation Arizona, Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro, Poder in Action, CASE, AZ Coalition 4 Change, Healthcare Rising Arizona, All Voting is Local – AZ, ACLU of Arizona, and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona.
The PAC identified The Arizona Republic as an endorser of their efforts.
Prop 128, allowing the state legislature to amend, divert funds from, or supersede an initiative or referendum found to contain illegal or unconstitutional language, failed; Prop 129, limiting ballot initiatives to a single subject, succeeded; and Prop 132, requiring initiatives and referendums seeking a tax change to receive at least 60 percent of votes, succeeded.
As AZ Free News reported in October, outside funding accounted for 99 percent of the PACs funds. However, the PAC claims on its website that outside funds only amount to 20 percent, and their mailers claimed that number was 43 percent.
The PAC received over $2.1 million from the Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers (SEIU-UHW): the California union that largely financed the dark money-fueled Predatory Debt Collection Act, Proposition 209, which voters just approved. Prop 209 essentially makes all debt collection futile. That PAC also received $250,000 from the National Education Association (NEA); nearly $258,600 from the Fairness Project, established by SEIU-UHW; $60,000 from Every Single Vote; and over $51,000 from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC). Nearly all of these funds derive from organizations dedicated to influencing the outcome of state-level ballot referendums in favor of progressive policy.
Will of the People Arizona spent over $1.6 million on communications like ads and mailers, and over $66,500 on polling and consulting.
Montoya also runs one of the most powerful leftist dark money organizations: Opportunity Arizona, which receives much of its funding from the Arabella Advisors’ Hopewell Fund.
As of this report, AZ Free News uncovered Montoya’s influence as campaign committee or PAC treasurer, or TMW payee, in at least 16 other states: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
President Joe Biden will make his first visit to Arizona, after nearly two years in office.
The president will come to north Phoenix to celebrate the development of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) plant. The foreign company is scheduled to begin its Phoenix operations in 2024.
The Biden administration has a keen interest in domestic semiconductor manufacturing — the president signed the CHIPS and Science Act in August, the day after the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Senators Mark Kelly and Krysten Sinema focused on the act’s passage rather than the raid. The pair championed the legislation as means of improving the flagging economy.
The closest Biden came to visiting was last February. Biden, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, engaged in a virtual tour of an Arizona State University (ASU) vaccination site at State Farm.
Earlier this week, Vice President Harris and I took a virtual tour of a vaccination site in Arizona. Because of the hard work of these folks — and countless others across the country — we’re going to beat this virus once and for all. pic.twitter.com/xekXB967h5
Former President Donald Trump first visited Arizona as president in August 2017, several weeks after the Charlottesville, Virginia “Unite the Right” protest after which several counter-protesters were run over and killed. He visited again in October 2018.
Harris has yet to visit the state, either. Apart from the virtual ASU tour, the closest the vice president came to visiting Arizona was a trip to the Arizona-Nevada border along Lake Mead.
Yesterday, I visited Lake Mead, which is a crucial source of water for 25 million people, including those living in Nevada, California, and Arizona. Due to the climate crisis, Lake Mead has dropped to its lowest level ever–causing water shortages for some of these communities. pic.twitter.com/EAQgl4m8n7
The last time the vice president came to the state was in October 2020 on her campaign trail. Harris visited Tucson and Phoenix.
Harris remains absent from the state, despite designation as border czar and Arizona being one of the states hardest hit by the border crisis under their administration. To date, the vice president has only made one border trip to Texas, after much resistance. Legislators and pundits criticized that visit, however, contending that Harris made a brief stop at a Border Patrol station miles from the site of the border crisis.
A detailed record of Biden’s public calendar is available here. The LA Times maintains an open-source data archive of Harris’ public calendar.
Although no border crisis existed at the time, Vice President Mike Pence visited Arizona multiple times in 2019. In April of that year, he addressed a controversial razor wire topping the border wall in Nogales. He came in March to speak with the National Association of Manufacturers and tour the Drug Enforcement Agency facility and returned in October to visit the Caterpillar manufacturing site.
Prior to that, Pence visited Arizona several other times to visit with Governor Doug Ducey and other lawmakers, including his stumping for former Republican Senator Martha McSally.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
The Arizona Supreme Court will issue a ruling in the next few months that could allow complaints to be resolved and enforced by state agencies even if the agency did not have authority to impose a penalty or sanction in the first place.
On Nov. 15, the justices conducted oral arguments in a dispute between Legacy Foundation Action Fund and the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission over nearly $100,000 in penalties imposed in 2015 against Action Fund for alleged violations related to election finance reports and political ads.
The Legacy Foundation Action Fund unsuccessfully challenged the Clean Elections Commission’s authority during agency-level proceedings, including an argument that the Commission lacked subject matter jurisdiction. Subject matter jurisdiction is a legal requirement that a given court or government agency has the authority to hear the matter brought before it.
Attorneys for the Action Fund did not timely appeal the issue, waiting instead until 2018 to revive the jurisdictional issue when the Commission sought to collect the penalty.
Earlier this year, the Arizona Court of Appeals issued a split opinion which held in part that the “need for finality” with a decision of an Arizona administrative agency can be more important than whether the agency actually had authority to issue the decision in the first place.
The opinion also noted a judgment by a state-chartered agency such as the Clean Elections Commission is not a legal nullity if the party failed to raise the jurisdictional issue in a timely appeal.
However, a strongly worded dissenting opinion by Judge Cynthia Bailey noted that while Legacy Foundation Action Fund forfeited several appellate rights by not filing its appeal on time, “it did not, and could not, forfeit” its right to challenge the Commission’s subject-matter jurisdiction.
“Subject-matter jurisdiction can neither be waived nor conferred by stipulation. A court simply cannot hear a case over which it has no jurisdiction,” Bailey wrote, adding that “under Arizona statutes and rules, the potential injustice when an agency acts beyond its statutory authority outweighs any interest in finality and judicial economy.”
Bailey’s dissent opinion closely aligns with arguments put forth in an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed with the Arizona Supreme Court by the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.
The Goldwater Institute is a nonpartisan public policy and research foundation whose priorities include the defense of individual rights against Arizona’s various state agencies which often operate outside the boundaries of evidentiary and procedural protections.
In the brief, attorney Timothy Sandefur cites prior court decisions in Arizona—some dating back to the 1920s—which have led to established case law that a judgment issued by a court, tribunal, or agency that lacks jurisdiction is void ab initio, or legally null.
“This has always been the rule in Arizona…and it should not be altered now,” Sandefur wrote, pointing out that Action Fund’s only opportunity to have its jurisdictional challenge heard was by the Commission itself, “which is not a judicial body, but a party to this dispute.”
And to elevate finality in litigation over validity as the court of appeals did “is to elevate form over substance and – alarmingly – efficiency over legitimacy,” the brief states.
Sandefur urged the Arizona Supreme Court justices to reject establishing a new legal standard for jurisdiction, especially in light of the burden it will create for people trying to defend themselves when agencies overstep their bounds, Sandefur wrote.
That burden “is likely to fall hardest on unsophisticated and unrepresented parties, particularly small business owners, workers, and entrepreneurs, who are often subjected to enforcement by regulatory agencies and often lack the wherewithal to obtain legal representation,” he added.
A decision from the Arizona Supreme Court is expected in Spring 2023.
Arizonans have less than five months to obtain a federally-compliant form of identification needed to clear TSA airport security checkpoints or access certain Department of Defense (DOD) installations.
Beginning on May 3, 2023, an accepted identification credential under the REAL ID Act such as the Arizona Travel ID or a valid passport will be required before boarding any domestic flight. Arizonans risk being denied boarding because the standard Arizona driver license will no longer be accepted by the TSA, according to the Arizona Department of Transportation – Motor Vehicle Division (MVD).
As a result, MVD is urging people to upgrade their driver’s licenses or state identification cards to the Arizona Travel ID now rather than wait. The credential, which is distinguished on Arizona issued identification by a star in the upper right corner, costs $25.
Because the Arizona Travel ID meets more stringent identification standards than a typical driver’s license, applicants will need to provide extra documentation This includes:
Proof of identity: a birth certificate or US passport
Social Security Number (just the number, not the card)
Two documents proving Arizona residency: i.e., rental or bank statements, credit card or cell phone bills with your name and current Arizona address)
The REAL ID Act of 2005 put into place a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission for the federal government to set minimum standards for the issuance of sources of identification, such as driver’s licenses. Deadlines for compliance have been extended numerous times in recent years, but requirements will now be enforced starting in May.
The Act also prohibits some federal agencies from accepting driver’s licenses and identification cards in certain situations if the issuing state does not meet the Act’s minimum standards. Situations requiring a compliant identification include domestic flights and entrance to DOD-controlled facilities and installations.
Current Arizona residents who have an Arizona-issued driver’s license or identification card can make an appointment for the Arizona Travel ID card at AZ MVD Now.
TSA does not require children under age 18 to provide REAL ID credentialed identification when traveling within the U.S. if accompanied by an adult companion who has compliant identification.
REAL ID cards are not sufficient identification for border crossings or other travel situations which require a visa, passport, or passport card. Learn more at azdot.gov/TravelID
