PHOENIX — Nothing recovered from the cell phone of state utility regulator Bob Stump is a public record, a judge ruled Friday.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner said he reviewed several hundred texts that Stump deleted from a state-owned cell phone he had since discarded. The Attorney General’s Office used computer programs to recover data that moved from that phone to another one Stump was issued.
Warner said just 36 texts fell within the dates sought by attorney Dan Barr under public records law, on behalf of the Checks and Balances Project. But those messages came up empty, the judge said.
The judge was able to see some of the others, but said they either were personal matters or protected by attorney-client privilege and therefore not public.
Stump, in a prepared statement, declared himself vindicated.
“This solar dark money-funded fishing expedition, undertaken to intimidate regulators, has ended without any fish,” said Stump, a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission. “These are not public documents.”
But Barr, the attorney who sued to see the text messages said that does not end the legal fight. In fact, Barr said it only strengthens his claim that the phone should be examined by another expert, this one of his choosing.
He pointed out that the request was for 3,600 specific texts between Stump and others, including two candidates, their campaign manager, the head of a group using anonymous cash to get them elected, and a utility executive.
These were identified from a log of Stump’s texts in the months leading up to the 2014 Republican primary. Stump was not a candidate that year but was backing the two candidates, Tom Forese and Doug Little, against two others who favored more solar energy.
“The point is, they failed to recover 99 percent of what we were asking for,” Barr said of the report given to Warner. “And of the 1 percent they recovered, there’s nothing in the messages. That questions the quality of the search.”
He argued that it’s really impossible to send a blank text. Barr said even if there is no message, there should be certain other data. He said he will renew his effort to have the phone examined by an expert in this kind of data retrieval.
Warner had previously rejected that proposal.
David Cantelme, attorney for the commission, said he will oppose any move for another examination.
“We have no reason not to have any confidence in what the attorney general and the Pinal County sheriff’s office did,” he said, referring to the fact that the sheriff’s office, at the request of the attorney general, also used software to look at the contents of the phone. “There’s got to be an end to it.”
Cantelme said no one had an incentive not to recover as much as possible.
