Thanks Maricopa County
Maricopa County requested the public records log from Mark Brnovich's Office in May and I have those records.
Way back when Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich was running for the U.S. Senate and “investigating” Maricopa County and the so-called “audit”1 of the 2020 election conducted by Cyber Ninjas, Brnovich hurled a claim at the county that had the largest county in the state respond out of what can be only described as top-notch pettiness.
Brnovich, who had recently released an unprecedented interim report of his investigation, claimed the county was taking its grand ole time to turn over public records. A claim the county denied, which led the Board of Supervisors to respond with a request of their own: Brnovich’s Office’s public records log between May 2020 and May 2022.
Well, the AG’s office complied with the request, but nobody has spoken about the findings until now.
I requested communications between the county and AG’s Office (through the county) relating to the request and any responses since, unsure if that request had even been fulfilled after a few months. It had.
Find all the corresponding documents here.
Compared to the public records log I received and wrote about in my inaugural post about Gov. Doug Ducey’s office, it shows Brnovich’s office responds to records much quicker on average, though it still has taken close to one year or surpassing the mark on a few occasions during the two-year span.
The county requested the docs officially on May 11, 2022 and received the responsive records on June 17, 2022, which is about on par with how long the office takes to turn documents over to the requestor.
In the June response from Brnovich’s Office, the records employee said the median response time was 17 days and that it filled 1,071 requests in the timeframe requested between May 1, 2020 and May 5, 2022.
Browsing through the records log myself, I noticed a few things:
Most requests appear to be fulfilled in under 2 months
There are a few outliers like one that took 510 days2 to turn over email records over a 10-day span in December 2020 or one that took 333 days where a requestor was looking into a boatload of records pertaining to the high-profile Brnovich v. Arizona Board of Regents case, which eventually contributed to Brnovich's diversion agreement with the State Bar.
The office keeps everything neatly organized into a spreadsheet, which is clearly an argument in favor of public records request forms – something the office utilized
I should add, I despise records request forms. They are not required by law for you to fill out, some of them (looking at you DPS) require you to provide way too much personal information in order to submit a request and a lot of them ask questions that are not pertinent to the request being made.
The spreadsheet also makes clear if a request was “released” meaning fulfilled; “denied” for whatever reason most likely being it’s not a public record; referred out, which I can only assume means a different agency was better suited to respond; or if there wasn’t anything responsive.3
The most interesting thing I noticed though is records may be missing from this spreadsheet.
In the AG’s June response it only mentioned that some of the requests may have been fulfilled between the county’s request and when the office turned it over
Please note the spreadsheets were printed shortly after your request was received and therefore any requests that have been closed since that time are not reflected on the attached spreadsheets.
But American Oversight, the liberal-leaning nonprofit currently still involved with the Arizona Senate’s “audit” records lawsuit, claimed in May when the county filed its request that it has been waiting more than a year on some records.
Another example from American Oversight claimed it requested records in July 2021 about communications with pro-gun advocacy groups, but hadn’t received the records by May of this year. The records log shows that request being fulfilled in March 2022.
Yet another tweet in that thread said, “In the past two years, we’ve filed 49 public records requests with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. We are still waiting on records in response to 18 of those requests.”
So how many American Oversight requests appeared in the responsive documents?
Take a look at the log for yourself and let me know what you found, or if you think I should request any of those docs myself to publish on here.
It wasn’t an audit.
It’s possible the records person accidentally put May 6, 2022 as the fulfilled date instead of May 6, 2021, but that’s not what it says.
I’m always highly skeptical (it’s why I’m meant to be a journalist) when something says there aren’t any records pertaining to your request. There’s really no way to prove it true unless someone is willing to sue over it, which takes time and money. If only we could actually trust our government to be transparent and forthcoming.