PHOENIX — The Attorney General’s Office is expanding its inquiry into allegations of improper conduct by members of the Arizona Corporation Commission.
Ryan Anderson, spokesman for the attorney general, said his agency’s investigators believe the phone that had been used by Commissioner Bob Stump in 2014 is relevant to the inquiry they have now been conducting for months on activities at the commission going back to 2012. So on Tuesday, Don Conrad, the head of the agency’s criminal division, got Jodi Jerich, the commission’s executive director, to give them the phone she has had under lock and key since questions were first raised about text messages that might be retrieved.
The move is significant: By moving the focus beyond the 2012 race, it suggests the Attorney General’s office believes there may be links between those activities and events that unfolded in the 2014 election.
Anderson would not say how investigators think that Stump’s activities in 2014 are related to the original probe.
“I will let investigators make that determination in terms of what they see as relevant to the ongoing whistleblower complaint,” he said. “Obviously, they felt there was enough of a need to analyze the phone and see what sort of information was there.”
The original probe stems from allegations that former Commissioner Gary Pierce had met secretly with Don Brandt, chief executive officer of Arizona Public Service, and Don Robinson, his predecessor, while the utility was in the middle of a rate case before the agency. These were laid out in a letter from a whistleblower, later identified as a former commission staffer, to Attorney General Mark Brnovich and others.
The same complaint said Pierce used his office to coerce commission staffers to expedite the formation of a corporation that Capitol Media Services reported later spent $186,000 in the 2012 election on mailers to drum up support for Stump’s re-election and to help elect fellow Republicans Bob Burns and Susan Bitter Smith.
The decision to probe into Stump’s cellphone shows investigators are now looking into the 2014 race.
If nothing else, transferring the phone to the Attorney General’s Office should mean it will finally be electronically examined to see if the texts Stump was sending and receiving ahead of the 2014 Republican primary can be retrieved. Both the state Department of Public Safety and the Phoenix Police Department had refused to get involved.
“We have people here who are fully capable of conducting this kind of search,” Anderson said.
There are some common points of connection between the two elections.
The latest questions about Stump relate to records showing a series of texts between him and Scot Mussi, head of the Free Enterprise Club, ahead of the 2014 GOP primary. At the time, Mussi’s group was spending more than $300,000 to help elect Doug Little and Tom Forese over two other Republicans who were running on a platform supporting more solar energy.
That text log also shows communications between Stump and Forese and Little, as well as with an APS executive.
A commission attorney said Stump “routinely” deleted the texts and has since discarded his state-issued phone. The examination of Stump’s current phone will determine if the deleted messages were somehow transferred to it and can be retrieved.
Stump has denied any wrongdoing.
Mussi’s organization also played a role in the 2014 Republican primary, spending more than $500,000 on behalf of Justin Pierce in his ultimately unsuccessful bid to become secretary of state. Justin is the son of Gary Pierce.
Then there’s the question of whether the elder Pierce helped expedite formation of the corporation that spent money in 2012 to get Stump re-elected to another four-year term. Those outside donations also helped defeat incumbent Democrats Paul Newman and Sandra Kennedy and replace them with two Republicans.
Stump’s name also shows up in the whistleblower complaint, with the former staffer saying he informed Stump, then the chairman, about what he said were irregular activities by Pierce. But he said Stump never did anything about them.
Anderson said that Brnovich has removed himself from the investigation.
Brnovich was the beneficiary of about $2.9 million spent by the Republican Attorneys General Association on the 2014 race. And about $425,000 of that was given to RAGA by Arizona Public Service.
