I was devastated to hear that our former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich died of a heart attack at age 59 a week ago, just two days after we’d last texted. He was a longtime good friend, going back to our days working together as Assistant Attorneys General for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. We shared an office wall and hit it off instantly when we discovered that he had written a conservative column for Arizona State University and I had written a conservative column for the University of Arizona.
After he became the Arizona Attorney General, I wrote countless articles about his efforts to look into wrongdoing in the 2020 election and prosecute election crimes. But strangely, due to the mainstream media spinning their coverage of him to make him appear to be soft on that issue, a false perception grew that he wasn’t tough enough.
Critics attacked him for saying there was no election wrongdoing immediately after the 2020 election. But that was taken out of context; he merely said he hadn’t personally seen any yet in the first couple of days. People confused him with former Governor Doug Ducey, telling me that he’d certified the 2020 election results — but that was Ducey; they were mistaken.
In reality, Brnovich doggedly pursued investigations through his election integrity champion attorney, Jennifer Wright. He’d created an election integrity unit, which she led on the civil side. After the election, Brnovich told the Maricopa County Supervisors to increase the number of ballots counted by hand from two percent to five percent, but they refused. Then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs demanded that Brnovich shut down the audit, but he didn’t. He forced the supervisors to turn over materials they were withholding from the audit, threatened to withhold their funding and filed a brief defending the audit. He released a preliminary interim report, which found that 100,000 to 200,000 ballots lacked a chain of custody. He intervened and prevented the illegal “curing” of ballots with no signatures.
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But the supervisors constantly thwarted his efforts. Wright sent them four letters demanding equipment and data to investigate the 2020 election, and they refused to turn over much of it. Without it, a full investigation by his office or the Arizona Senate was never performed.
Election integrity expert John Droz wrote about how a full investigation of elections cannot be conducted without three aspects: a voter forensic audit, a machine forensic audit and a ballot process forensic audit. The Maricopa County audit never got to much of this.
Brnovich was one of the most aggressive attorneys general in the country, combating the problem.
When Hobbs refused to defend the state’s new law banning ballot harvesting, Brnovich intervened and represented the state all the way to the Supreme Court, winning a victory in Brnovich v. DNC.
People demanded prosecutions, and Brnovich is one of the very few prosecutors who did, putting a Democratic operative and official behind bars for ballot harvesting. He went to court and successfully stopped then-Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes from illegally mailing thousands of ballots to voters in 2020 who didn’t request them. He issued a cease-and-desist letter to a ballot harvesting operation.
Brnovich led a coalition of states to defend North Carolina’s voter ID law and backed a Georgia law in court. He sued Hobbs over her failure to provide a lawful state Election Procedures Manual, since she refused to include provisions prohibiting unstaffed drop boxes, requiring signature verification for non- mailed early ballots and preserving the requirement that voters vote in their precinct. He asked for a criminal investigation into Hobbs.
Meanwhile, he was undermined constantly by the deep state in his criminal division, whom he couldn’t get rid of since they were merit-protected. When the group True the Vote brought their investigation featured in the movie 2,000 Mules to his office, the deep-staters wanted to turn it around and prosecute True the Vote! He shut that down, but it was difficult dealing with the renegades.
Brnovich sued the Biden administration more than almost any other attorney general (other than Ken Paxton). But for his efforts, the left filed 12 bogus bar complaints against him and his staff, putting them through misery for a couple of years fighting them. Finally, the State Bar of Arizona agreed to diversion agreements with them. But this meant they were being watched closely. Brnovich told me numerous times not to tell him anything negative about the assaults on him because, due to his health issues, his heart couldn’t handle the stress. He’d send me anguished texts about the bar investigations.
President Donald Trump nominated Brnovich to be ambassador to Serbia. However, due to deep state opposition, his nomination was withdrawn. In his final days, he worked for a large leftist law firm, Boies, Schiller, Flexner (David Boies was a prominent lawyer for Al Gore), and was under a lot of stress to survive there without controversy.
I believe the lawfare against him directly contributed to his heart attack. Brnovich was so much in the public eye, known nationwide, and subjected to so many vicious attacks that the stress was immense.
At the same time, he walked a tightrope, because his wonderful wife, Susan had become a U.S. District Court judge, putting even more pressure on them to avoid becoming targets.
Brnovich had a joyful, fun spirit, which is why so many of us were drawn to him. He had an incredible career, which included serving as a prosecutor for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, director of the Arizona Department of Gaming, Command Staff Judge Advocate for the United States Army National Guard and head of the Goldwater Institute’s constitutional division. He was a very close friends with UK Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, and with that party poised to sweep the election in 2028, I believe Brnovich’s next move would have been to work for Farage when he becomes prime minister. We will miss you, nunchucks.
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