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Tag: Mark Brnovich

Arizona officials urge counties to refuse grand jury subpoenas for voter records

Key Points:
  • Arizona officials tell counties to refuse grand jury subpoenas for voter records
  • Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes cite ongoing federal lawsuit
  • Arizona officials released documents contradicting claims of widespread election fraud

Fearing an end-run around the courts, two top state officials are telling counties to refuse to comply with any grand jury subpoenas for their voter records.

In a joint letter to county recorders, Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes remind them that there is already a lawsuit in federal court over whether the Department of Justice is entitled to a full, unredacted list of voter information. There is no date set for a hearing.

But what has changed since the lawsuit was filed, they said, is that Senate President Warren Petersen, responding to a grand jury subpoena, turned over records related to the Senate’s audit of the conduct and results of the 2020 election. And that, they warned, appears to be part of an end-run around the federal court for the Trump administration to get the documents it wants — regardless of what a federal judge rules.

That’s not all. It also comes as the Department of Homeland Security, apparently conducting its own probe, has asked Mayes’ office for some documents it has related to the 2020 election.

Richie Taylor, a spokesman for Mayes, said it surrendered both a report that was done reviewing the audit by her predecessor, Mark Brnovich, as well as some documents that Brnovich did not make public before he left office at the end of 2022.

Taylor said there was no subpoena, as all those documents are public records. But he said that nothing else has been provided to Homeland Security.

All that, according to Mayes and Fontes, leads them to believe that federal agencies will use the grand jury process — and the ability of prosecutors to subpoena documents — to circumvent the question before the federal judge of whether the agencies have a legal right to demand what they are seeking. And the two Arizona officials said they want to be sure that county recorders do not play a role in letting that happen.

“We reiterate our offices’ position here just in case you may be contemplating disclosure,” the pair wrote. “We write to inform you that doing so would violate both federal and state law.”

The disclosure of the Homeland Security inquiry drew a sharp response from Gov. Katie Hobbs who was the secretary of state in 2020.

“Arizona’s 2020 election has been investigated and verified in Republican-led audits,” she said in a comment March 10 night posted on social media. “Pulling agents off serious work like combating human trafficking to chase debunked election conspiracies is irresponsible and a threat to public safety.”

This all comes as the Trump administration has shown renewed interest in revisiting the 2020 election, particularly in states where he was outpolled by Joe Biden. That occurred in enough states, including in Arizona, to deny him the electoral votes needed at that time for a second term.

Now back in office, Trump has expressed frustration that Attorney General Pam Bondi has not done more to investigate his claim that the election was stolen from him.

Arizona is among 29 states and the District of Columbia where the Department of Justice has filed suit to demand full voter files after state officials refused to comply. That includes not just things that are public like name and party registration, but also what Fontes said is legally protected private information like birth dates, driver license numbers, signatures and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

The agency, however, has said it is not investigating any particular violations of law but simply fulfilling its mission to be sure that states are keeping voter rolls updated.

Fontes, however, told a federal judge it appears the real goal is for the federal government to amass a national centralized database on millions of Americans. And he said that appears to be part of a plan to check the immigration status of those on the voter rolls.

And now there is the request by Homeland Security to Mayes for information about the 2020 race.

Taylor said that Mayes did turn over some findings released in 2022 by Brnovich in which he claimed his office had “uncovered instances of election fraud by individuals who have been or will be prosecuted for various election crimes.”

That, however, wasn’t all Mayes turned over to Homeland Security. Taylor said they also got a follow-up report she released after taking office in 2023, a report that included evidence that Brnovich and his top aide had been told by their own staffers, even before releasing the 2022 report, that there was no basis for such claims of fraud.

And Taylor said that, in response to further requests from Homeland Security, the Attorney General’s Office last week even prepared a Power Point presentation. But he said that there has been no further cooperation with Homeland Security since then.

Now Mayes and Fontes want to be sure that county recorders aren’t providing anything that is not already a public record — even if they are served with a subpoena.

“I implore you to fulfill your oath by declining any such illegal demands,” the letter to the recorders says.

“If your office receives a federal grand jury subpoena demanding that you turn over voters’ private data, we urge you to notify our offices immediately,” they wrote. “The grand jury should not serve to circumvent Arizona’s ongoing lawsuit, and our offices will pursue all legal actions available to prevent the Department of Justice from misusing the grand jury process.”

What makes the  information Mayes turned over to Homeland Security significant is that it represents two different views of what did and did not happen in the 2020 election — views that Homeland Security could choose to use or ignore as it pursues any investigation.

Brnovich, a Republican, was running in 2022 for U.S. Senate. And his report included various allegations that signatures may not have been properly verified on early ballot envelopes and that “there are problematic systemwide issues that related to early ballot handling and verification.”

But Mayes, a Democrat who won her 2022 election to replace Brnovich, disclosed in her 2023 report information she said Brnovich had withheld from the public, including a memo from the agency’s Special Investigations Section — information she said showed that her predecessor knew there was no basis for what the attorney general was reporting in 2022,

That 2022 memo said that agents and support staff had spent more than 10,000 hours investigating and reviewing alleged instances of illegal voting submitted by various private parties. Those came not only from Cyber Ninjas, the private firm without any election auditing experience hired by Senate President Karen Fann to conduct the audit, but also True the Vote which has been at the forefront of denying the results of the 2020 election.

“In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations,” that memo stated. “The information that was provided was speculated in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.”

And there was something else in the memo.

The investigators said that there were elected officials who had made public statements asserting that voting fraud had occurred and that fraud was a factor in the outcome of the 2020 election.

Yet when actually questioned by investigators — under circumstances where they were told they could be prosecuted for making false reports to law enforcement agencies — “the elected officials did not repeat or make such assertions.”

That included Mark Finchem, at the time a Republican representative from Oro Valley and now a state senator from Prescott. Finchem had publicly stated he had a source reporting that more than 30,000 fraudulent or fictitious votes were registered in Pima County during the 2020 general election. Investigators then requested to speak with him.

“During that meeting, Mr. Finchem did not repeat those allegations, specifically stating he did not have any evidence of fraud and he did not wish to take up our time,” the investigators reported.

What he did provide were four ballots he said was evidence of a flawed process for mailing and counting ballots.

The investigators, however, said they found the ballots had been mailed to prior residents of the address on file, the residents had moved, the ballots cannot be forward and they were unopened and not counted.

They also said that Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, who had alleged widespread fraud in the 2020 election “refused to meet with us, saying she was waiting to see the ‘perp walk’ of those who committed fraud during the election.”

Federal probe examines debunked 2020 Arizona election audit

Key Points:
  • Federal grand jury subpoenas records from 2020 Arizona election audit
  • Senate President Warren Petersen complies with federal subpoena for audit records
  • Attorney General Kris Mayes calls the grand jury inquiry “weaponization”

A federal grand jury apparently is looking at the results of a long-ago-debunked “audit” of the 2020 Arizona election.

Senate President Warren Petersen said in a social media post on Monday that he “received and complied with” a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to the Senate audit of Maricopa County results following the 2020 election. That is a race where Joe Biden outpolled Donald Trump.

“The FBI has the records,” Petersen said.

He declined to comment further.

This comes just weeks after the FBI raided Fulton County, Ga. — another state where Trump lost in 2020 — seizing their election records from that year.

Both events come amid ongoing claims by Trump, who lost the 2020 election, that there was extensive fraud. And he has publicly urged his Department of Justice to investigate.

“Great!!!” the president posted on social media in response to the reports of the subpoena in Arizona.

There was no immediate response from the FBI.

But what Trump — or his agency — hopes to get out of it remains unclear.

In fact, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, who reviewed what he got in 2022 from then-Senate President Karen Fann, found the report prepared by Cyber Ninjas as deeply flawed.

Brnovich for example, noted that the report claimed that 282 people who had allegedly died in early October 2020 cast ballots in the November general election.

“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead,” he said. “Many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.”

In fact, the attorney general said, only one of 282 listed voters on that report actually was deceased. The others were not only quite alive but also current voters.

But it wasn’t just what Cyber Ninjas had provided that Brnovich concluded was largely unfounded.

He said his agency’s Election Integrity Unit looked at the names of another 409 allegedly dead voters that came from other sources. And then investigators went through yet another report of 5,943 names, which made no distinction between dead voters and dead registrants.

“Once again, these claims were thoroughly investigated and resulted in only a handful of potential cases,” Brnovich told Fann.

“Some were so absurd the names and birth dates didn’t even match the deceased,” he reported. “And others included dates of death after the election.”

And Brnovich said while his agency has previously prosecuted other instances of dead people voting, even those cases “were ultimately determined to be isolated incidents.”

Of note is that the audit also included a hand count of the 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots. And it found that Biden actually outpolled Trump by an even larger margin than the official tally.

Responding to the reports of a grand jury subpoena, Kris Mayes, the current attorney general, cited the Brnovich investigation into the Cyber Ninjas report. And she said that complaints and allegations submitted to the AG’s office “were also unsupported by factual evidence.”

“Warren Petersen knows all this,” she said. “He has known it for years.”

Mayes also said that Petersen, who is running to be the GOP nominee for attorney general to take her on in November, has been “an unrepentant election denier.” She pointed to a rally he had after the election in 2020 claiming “we certified the vote prematurely.”

Petersen then co-chaired the oversight of the Cyber Ninjas inquiry with Fann.

Mayes also took a shot at the president, saying that what his administration appears to be pursuing is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry.

“It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies,” she said.

The 2022 report by Brnovich was only one of several that concluded that Cyber Ninjas’ findings, which had never conducted an election audit before being hired by Fann, were misleading or outright wrong.

Other claims had since been debunked, including people voting duplicate ballots, machine-filled-in ballots, missing signatures on absentee ballots, and tallying machines linked to the internet.

For example, Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, claimed that the county logged 74,232 more early ballots than the number of requests sent out.

County spokesman Fields Moseley, whose staff worked with the county recorder to research the claims, said in response at the time, there were two problems with that.

First, he said the records show there were 2,364,426 requests for early ballots, with 1,918,024 returned.

“So the claim is not just wrong but completely wrong,” he said.

Aside from that, Moseley pointed out that there are two ways to vote early: with a mail-in ballot or going directly to one of the early voting locations. And in the latter case, people are handed ballots that are prepared there but lumped into the early ballot category.

“So it’s not unusual that we would have more early votes than mail-in ballots sent,” Moseley said.

There even was a lawsuit over a related issue of whether the tabulation machines were properly recording votes when ballots, which had been damaged or had extra marks, had to be redone by hand so they could be fed through counting machines.

In that case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said that a random check of 1,626 of these ballots, ordered by a trial court, found an error rate of as low as 0.37% or as high as 0.55%.

But the justice said that extrapolating that out to the 27,869 ballots that had to be duplicated to be able to be counted would have gained Donald Trump just 103 votes or, at best, 153 votes, “neither of which is sufficient to call the election results into question.”

Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich dies at 59

Former Attorney General Mark Brnovich has died at age 59, his family announced Tuesday. 

Brnovich led a storied career in state government and politics, carving his path from prosecutor to lobbyist to department director to two-term attorney general. 

“Best known as Arizona’s 26th Attorney General, a state and federal prosecutor, and champion of justice, he will forever be remembered and cherished by us as a beloved father, husband, son, and brother,” The Brnovich family said in a statement. “We are heartbroken with this loss and are deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support from so many wonderful people across the state and country.” 

Brnovich, a son of Serbian immigrants, studied political science at Arizona State University, later received his law degree from the University of San Diego and went on to work at nearly every level of government.

His resume includes stints as an intern for former Sen. John McCain and as a Command Staff Judge Advocate for the National Guard. 

Brnovich went on to work as a prosecutor at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office and, later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona. 

He led the Center for Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute, and lobbied for the private prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America, all the while serving as a judge pro tem at Maricopa County Superior Court.  

Gov. Jan Brewer then appointed Brnovich to serve as the Director of the Arizona Department of Gaming in 2009 and headed the agency until 2013.

He left office in 2013 to run for the Attorney General’s Office in 2014, pitted against then-incumbent Attorney General Tom Horne.

Brnovich bested Horne and clinched a second term in 2019. 

Horne mourned Brnovich’s passing, putting past political rivalry aside.

“Mark Brnovich was an outstanding, dedicated public servant and a devoted family man. He will be missed, Horne said. “At one time we were political opponents, but we eventually became friends, for which I am grateful.” 

During his time as attorney general, Brnovich championed consumer protection, collecting millions in settlements from companies such as Theranos, General Motors, Volkswagen and Ticketmaster. 

In his second term, he refuted President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020, though he stopped short of pursuing prosecution of the electors who submitted a false slate for Trump and delayed the release of a report on the 2020 election. 

Amid his campaign for U.S. Senate, Brnovich resumed capital punishment in the state, following a long pause after the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014.

He oversaw executions of three death row inmates in his last year in office. 

Brnovich went on to lose the Republican primary for the Senate to Blake Masters. 

He was in private practice when his name was briefly floated by the Trump administration for the ambassadorship to Serbia. But his name was later pulled from consideration without explanation. 

Brnovich is survived by his wife, Arizona District Court Judge Susan Brnovich, and his two daughters, Milena and Sofija. 

A swell of condolences from across the political spectrum followed the announcement of Brnovich’s passing. 

Former Gov. Doug Ducey said, “It was an honor to campaign with and serve alongside Mark Brnovich. His passion for the law, justice, and victims were hallmarks of his career in public service.” 

Attorney General Kris Mayes said, “Arizona is grateful for his service. My thoughts, and those of everyone he worked with at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, are with his loved ones today.” 

Senate President Warren Petersen remembered Brnovich as a “devoted public servant.” 

“Mark’s story reflected the best of Arizona – the son of immigrant parents who believed in this country, a veteran who served in the Arizona National Guard, and a public servant who took his oath seriously,” Petersen said in a statement. “His commitment to public service was matched by his love for this state and his pride in being an Arizonan. He leaves behind a legacy of principled leadership and a record of service that will not be forgotten.”

The Brnovich family said information on the memorial service arrangement would be made public when available. 

Brnovich out as ambassador nominee, cites ‘deep state’ bureaucracy

Key Points:
  • Mark Brnovich’s ambassador nomination to Serbia withdrawn
  • White House gives no reason for withdrawal announcement
  • Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner has a $500 million deal in Serbia

Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich will not be the next ambassador to Serbia.

The White House sent a message to the Senate late last week, stating that it was withdrawing Brnovich’s nomination. No reason was given for the announcement. And there was no immediate response from the White House.

Brnovich himself did not return repeated messages seeking comment.

But in a statement reported in the Serbian Times, he said it became clear that his nomination on April 29 was not going anywhere.

“As the process dragged on, it became clear that the bureaucracy of the ‘deep state’ does not want to serve anyone with my political, ethnic and religious background in Serbia,” he said. Yet Brnovich said both of his parents came from Serbia.

Brnovich, in thanking the president, said that he will take advantage of his status.

“I believe that staying close to family and friends in Arizona and finding an opportunity to play a greater role in the domestic political plan is the best way at this moment,” he told Serbian Times.

Trump’s nomination came after Brnovich, who had been state attorney general for eight years, made an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022. But he lost the GOP primary to Blake Masters, who, in turn, was defeated in the general election by Democrat Mark Kelly.

He had a rocky relationship with the president and his supporters after the 2020 race — the one that Trump lost both nationally and in Arizona — who claimed that he was unwilling or unable to investigate their claims that the election was rigged properly. In fact, Trump endorsed Masters in the primary.

In his first report in 2022, Brnovich recommended some changes in election law. That, however, produced no indictments, nor was there any evidence of fraud beyond a handful of people who had voted someone else’s ballot.

Later that year, he debunked findings in an “audit” of the 2020 race ordered by then-Senate President Karen Fann, who had hired a firm known as Cyber Ninjas to review the returns. They alleged that ballots were cast by people who had died.

“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead,” Brnovich said at the time. “Many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.”

Whatever Trump’s feelings were in 2022, things apparently changed after he returned to the White House in 2024.

In a post on Truth Social, the president wrote that Brnovich “will be a strong advocate for Freedom, and always put AMERICA FIRST.”

The State Department, in its most recent report on Serbia, said the country “occupies a key strategic juncture at the social, political, and geographic crossroads of Eastern and Western Europe.”

But the New York Times reported earlier this year that the relationship is much more complex, including that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has a deal with the Serbian government to build a $500 million hotel and apartment complex in the center of Belgrade, the nation’s capital. That project, the Times reports, involves the Trump Organization, which is run by Eric and Donald Jr., and the hotel will bear the Trump name.

The paper reports that the project has come under scrutiny from investigators after the Serbian government cleared the way by declaring that the site, a bombed-out building that serves as an icon to Serbians who suffered during a 1999 conflict, was no longer a culturally protected asset.

Condemned prisoner pushes for his execution

Aaron Gunches is telling the Arizona Supreme Court he is ready to die.

In a hand-written legal brief, Gunches, who had pleaded guilty to the 2002 first degree murder and kidnapping of Ted Price, told the justices he wants them this coming Wednesday to issue the legally necessary warrant to execute him.

Gunches said that will give the state Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry sufficient time to prepare the lethal drug and have it tested. Referring to himself in the third person in the filing, he told the justices that will set the stage for execution on Feb. 14, “where Gunches may have his long-overdue sentence carried out.”

Gunches, death row, lethal injection, Hobbs
Aaron Gunches

And he even pointed out that the date is within the 45-day window between the time the drug is compounded and it is no longer considered useful.

Attorney General Kris Mayes already was headed in that direction, having asked the state’s high court to set a briefing schedule to get the warrant of execution. Gunches, who had made an initial request more than two years ago to be executed, before Mayes took office in January 2023, told the justices all that is unnecessary.

“Gunches asks this court why is AG Mayes’ motion necessary?” he wrote. “It is pointless and just more ‘foot dragging’ by the state.”

Mayes, in her own filing, insists that additional time is necessary.

“A briefing schedule is important to ensure ADCRR can meet all execution-related requirements such as disclosures and testing obligations regarding the compounded pentobarbital that will be used,” wrote Jason Lewis, the deputy solicitor general on her behalf. 

“That is not true,” Gunches responded.

“ADCRR Director (Ryan) Thornell is using the exact same compound laboratory and the exact same drugs used by the previous ADCRR director,” he said.

And Gunches said that Thornell has said he has corrected any problems that occurred in the three prior executions where there were issues, including the inability to place the required intravenous line into the inmate, issues that led Gov. Katie Hobbs to hire retired federal magistrate David Duncan as a “death penalty commissioner” to review execution practices and Mayes to suspend all executions.

All that, said Gunches, came to naught.

“Two long years later, Gov. Hobbs fired him stating ADCRR Director Thornell had remedied all the problems and Gunches’ execution can go forth,” he wrote. Any further delay, Gunches told the justices, is unnecessary.

“This sentence is long overdue and should not be delayed any further,” he said. “Let the laws of Arizona finally be followed and justice served.”

He may not get his wish of a Feb. 14 execution.

Mayes, in her own filing, is telling the court she still wants a full-blown briefing schedule to ensure corrections officials are in fact ready to carry out the execution.

Price, Gunches’ victim, was his girlfriend’s ex husband.

His convictions were affirmed but the death sentence initially was thrown out. A new jury, however, reinstated the death penalty.

Gunches waived his right to post-conviction review and in November 2022 filed a motion on his own behalf seeking an execution warrant. That was joined the following month by then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich.

But by that time Brnovich was set to leave office by the end of the month.

That left Mayes in charge who, after Gunches withdrew his request, sought to withdraw the warrant.

The high court refused.

The only thing was, the warrant, which has a fixed time limit, expired before the execution was carried out. And Mayes refused to seek a new one while Duncan’s study was going on.

If and when Gunches is put to death, it would be the state’s first execution since 2022 when three inmates were given lethal injections.

Prior to that there had been an eight-year pause following the botched procedure when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours.

Gunches is one of 111 inmates on death row. Of that, 25, including Gunches, have exhausted or waived all appeals.

 

 

Glassman gets early start on 2026 AG race after series of unsuccessful campaigns

He’s been a Democrat and a Republican.

And he’s run for U.S. Senate, corporation commission, Maricopa County assessor and attorney general. All those efforts came up short.

But Phoenix attorney Rodney Glassman, whose last successful campaign outing was his 2007 election to the Tucson City Council, figures that the timing is right now for his latest political foray. And he’s giving it a jump start, already in the 2026 race for attorney general, even before the results of the 2024 election are all counted.

This time he figures he’s got an easier target: Democrat Kris Mayes.

She won the 2022 race by just 280 votes. But that was against Abe Hamadeh – who actually defeated Glassman in the Republican primary.

What’s also different is there was no incumbent seeking reelection two years ago, with Mark Brnovich leaving to make his own bid for Congress. This time, Glassman said Mayes now has a record, something he believes he can attack.

Still, that didn’t work out so well for him in 2010 when, as a Democrat, he sought to unseat incumbent Sen. John McCain, criticizing his policies and his refusal to pursue “pork barrel projects” for Arizona. Glassman got just 34% of the vote.

Glassman, however, told Capitol Media Services this time it’s different because he believes Mayes is vulnerable.

On one side, he claimed she is doing things she should not, like what he said is an improper attempt at rent control.

“I believe that private property owners, like people that own apartment buildings, should be able to charge the rent that they want to charge,” he said. 

But the lawsuit against landlords actually is not over how much they charged but that they colluded with RealPage, a software company that offers services to landlord, to artificially raise rents and conceal that plan from the public. That, her office contends, violates anti trust and consumer fraud laws and led to inflated rental prices in the Tucson and Phoenix areas.

Glassman was undeterred.

“The question is whether or not the attorney for the state is supposed to be championing economic development or going after business,” he said.

The GOP contender also questioned Mayes taking a role in efforts to halt the merger of the Albertsons and Kroger grocery chains.

Joining with the Federal Trade Commission, she argued that would reduce competition and drive up prices. The FTC eventually blocked the move.

Glassman said that he does believe the attorney general has a role in consumer protection. But he said Mayes is “doing it in a cavalier way, doing it in a predatory way.”

Glassman would not comment specifically on the indictment of the 11 “fake electors,” Republicans who signed documents saying that Trump had won the 2020 popular vote in Arizona – he had not – and they were the people authorized to cast the state’s 11 electoral votes for him. But he said Mayes has shown her willingness to use her office for political purposes.

He noted Mayes opened an inquiry into whether Donald Trump, had threatened the life of former Wyoming Sen. Liz Cheney at an Oct. 31 political rally in Glendale. That was based on comments by the former president about what Cheney, armed with a rifle, would feel like “with nine barrels shooting at her.”

The inquiry didn’t last when it became clear that was part of a larger quote about Cheney being “a radical war hawk.”

“You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Ah, gee, let’s send 10,000 troops into the mouth of the enemy,’ ” the full quote ran. Mayes said she eventually concluded that, based on the First Amendment, the comments could not be considered a threat.

Where Glassman may be on able to gather more traction are things that Mayes has admitted she is not doing.

“We’ve got an attorney general right now in Kris Mayes who won’t enforce a transgender laws to say that a boy can wake up on any given day and go and compete against my daughters,” Glassman said.

That relates to challenges to a 2022 law, dubbed the Save Women’s Sports Act, which requires public schools and any private schools that compete against them to designate their interscholastic or intramural sports strictly as male, female or coed.

More to the point, it specifically says that teams designed for women or girls “may not be open to students of the male sex.” And by “sex,”the law means the one assigned at birth based on a baby’s sex organs.

Mayes acknowledged she declined to defend the law, telling Capitol Media Services that it was clear her view on the statute did not align with state schools chief Tom Horne, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. But she did allow Horne to hire his own attorney.

“The Democrats were able to elect her with that way of thinking,” Glassman said. “I just disagree.”

A federal judge already has sided against the state, saying that two transgender girls who sued, neither of whom have gone through puberty, can participate in girls’ sports. But there has never been a ruling on whether the entire law is unconstitutional.

Mayes also said earlier this year she would not enforce the 1864 ban on abortion if the Arizona Supreme Court ruled it was still in effect. She said she believed the right to terminate a pregnancy is protected by a privacy clause in the Arizona Constitution.

While the justices did vote to reinstate the law, her vow and legal theory never was tested as state lawmakers rescinded the old law. And voters have since approved a new constitutional amendment creating a fundamental right to abortion.

Mayes did not immediately respond to multiple messages seeking comment.

Glassman’s history of running – and losing – goes beyond his 2010 loss to McCain.

After becoming a Republican in 2015 – he says that happened the same day Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency – Glassman was off and running again.

There was that 2018 race where he sought to be a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission. He was one of the two GOP nominees for the two open seats along with Justin Olson. But voters chose Olson and Democrat Sandra Kennedy.

Two years later, he attempted to take out Maricopa County Assessor Eddie Cook in the GOP primary. He lost by about five points.

And then there was the 2022 six-way Republican primary for attorney general, where he came in 10 points behind Hamadeh.

Mitchell, Mayes fight over who gets to execute inmates

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Republicans, lawyers struggle with next step on abortion ban

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Petersen threatens lawsuit if state elections manual not revised

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Arizona appellate court says 15-week abortion ban law of land

The Court of Appeals ruled the territorial-era abortion ban is unenforceable, making  abortions in Arizona legal before 15 weeks under the most recent law passed by the legislature.   Today’s ruling...

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