State police will not examine the cell phone of Bob Stump to determine if it contains deleted text messages that can be retrieved.

The Corporation Commission will extract text messages from Commissioner Bob Stump’s phone on Friday, using an expert from the Department of Public Safety overseen by a retired judge.

The Corporation Commission agreed to turn over Commissioner Bob Stump’s phone to a retired judge and independent technology expert to see if any text messages are retrievable and subject to public records laws.

Energy regulator Bob Stump routinely deleted text messages on his cellphones, including public records that cannot be retrieved, the Arizona Corporation Commission disclosed.

The Corp Comm is in no mood to furnish the DC-based Checks and Balances Project with additional information about Stump’s text messages. The group has been digging into Stump’s email and text communications to prove its point that Arizona’s energy commissioners have been lost to “regulatory capture,” the idea that regulators act more as consultants of the industries that they oversee than as objective overseers.

Arizona election regulators have taken note of records showing that Corporation Commissioner Bob Stump was in regular contact with the campaigns of candidates he supported and a “dark money” group that helped get them elected, and they want to see and inspect those records themselves.

Arizona Corporation Commissioner Bob Stump repeatedly communicated with the executive director of a “dark money” group that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help elect the candidates he backed, while also keeping regular contact with those candidates, their campaign manager, and a senior executive of the state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service, according to recently released records.

A national government watchdog group has hired a lawyer and is prepared to sue the Arizona Corporation Commission to compel the release of public records.

Arizona is known less as a hub for culture than as a haven for golf and recreation — so goes conventional wisdom. But this claim slights the institution that has been propelling Arizona’s boys into young manhood since 1948: The Phoenix Boys Choir.

My friend, Barry Goldwater Jr., paid spokesman for TUSK ("Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed"), has spoken on the race for Arizona Corporation Commission, and his words are an incitement to hearty debate. I write in defense of the candidate I have endorsed, Doug Little, whose candidacy has elicited a degree of ferocity that is entirely disproportionate to his views -- which are mainstream -- and disrespectful of his values, which are stellar.