Lawmakers are divided over whether to renew the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission before it expires this year, with some Republicans throwing out accusations of espionage and misconduct. 

At a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, lawmakers advanced a bill that would terminate the ACJC at the end of this year. However, a bill in the Senate sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers would extend ACJC for eight years. 

House Bill 2702, introduced by Reps. Alex Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, and Quang Nguyen, R-Prescott, originally contained a lengthy legislative findings section claiming the ACJC is attempting to surveil and collect data on law-abiding citizens.

“The ACJC is too dangerous to exist and must be discontinued,” Kolodin told the committee Thursday.

The ACJC primarily researches, monitors and helps implement criminal justice legislation in Arizona. It administers several grant programs and provides analysis of the state’s justice system to law enforcement agencies, the courts and lawmakers. The commission includes county attorneys and sheriffs from each political party, police chiefs, ex-judges, and various other county supervisors and criminal justice professionals. 

Kolodin and Nguyen argued that the commission has been lobbying the Legislature for years to pass laws that expand the kinds of data the ACJC can collect and analyze. The two also argued that the ACJC’s staff has engaged in improper lobbying practices, like pressuring other organizations to change their positions on bills or mischaracterizing the positions other groups were taking on bills.

Nguyen, who is chair of House Judiciary, also took issue with how ACJC and its executive director, Andrew LeFevre, have communicated with lawmakers. He said it has been difficult to get in contact with the commission in past sessions and also noted that LeFevre had not reached out to set up a meeting to discuss the issues surrounding ACJC’s continuation.

LeFevre defended ACJC and denied the allegations, saying the commission only collects data when statutorily authorized to do so. He apologized for past miscommunications regarding bills.

“If there was a misunderstanding between us, myself and you, I apologize for that, that we were not able to deal with that before now and I ask that we perhaps sit down and talk about that,” LeFevre told Nguyen during his testimony.

Kolodin also questioned LeFevre about ACJC’s Chairman David Byers and his involvement in the Judicial Branch’s Task Force on Disinformation. Byers is the director of the Administrative Office of the Courts and worked with the Arizona Supreme Court to create the task force, which examined ways the state’s courts could prevent attacks of disinformation from foreign entities. 

Kolodin called the task force a “mass censorship apparatus” and has argued on multiple occasions it actually spied on and suppressed the speech of Arizonans. The Arizona Capitol Times was unable to find any credible sources to support those claims. 

Rep. Alma Hernandez, D-Tucson, voted against HB 2702 and at one point during the hearing accused Kolodin of “engaging in personalities” or making personal attacks on Byers.

“I believe that there are a lot of conversations that need to be had between specific individuals … however, that is not what we’re here to debate today,” Hernandez said. “So any personalities or any issues that people have need to be handled and could be directed at those individuals.” 

She said it was wrong to question the director about the activities of the chairman who was elected by the commission. 

A spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the Courts noted that Byers was not in attendance at the hearing and “is not aware” of Kolodin’s concerns, but “is willing to talk to him to clarify any misunderstanding about the Task Force’s purpose.”

During his testimony, LeFevre noted that the task force and its duties were completely separate from ACJC’s work and also defended Byers, calling him a “good and honorable man and good public servant.”

LeFevre was supposed to testify Wednesday on the bill in the Senate that would extend ACJC, but that bill was held by the Judiciary and Elections Committee with no explanation. 

The accusations leveled at Wednesday’s House hearing echoed those made when LeFevre first testified before that committee on Jan. 15 as part of the periodic sunset review process that all agencies go through. 

During that hearing, Nguyen and Kolodin questioned LeFevre about the commission’s data collection, its support of a bill they said would create a gun registry and the disinformation task force. A week later, they introduced House Bill 2702, which would terminate the commission on Dec. 31, 2025.

Originally, HB2702 outlined a list of allegations, including attempts to surveil gun owners with concealed weapons permits and creating a database to track them. However, Nguyen sponsored an amendment that passed with the bill on Wednesday that removed the section containing those allegations.

In a letter sent to lawmakers on Jan. 29, ACJC called the statements made by Nguyen and Kolodin “factually inaccurate information and false assertions designed to misrepresent and cast in a negative light the work that the agency has done on behalf of the citizens of Arizona.”