Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Mark Brnovich (AP)
By Andrew Oxford | Arizona Republic
A proposal by Republican lawmakers to prohibit the Attorney General’s Office from advising Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and ban her from hiring outside lawyers comes months after Hobbs filed a complaint about the legal representation provided by several members of the attorney general’s staff.
Hobbs charged that the Attorney General’s Office violated ethics rules in several cases, such as by advising her office in a lawsuit and later intervening on the opposite side.
“In several election lawsuits, the AG’s Office has represented the SOS, received confidential attorney-client communications, provided advice, filed papers on behalf of the SOS, and then withdrawn from representation and appeared in the same litigation on behalf of a different party asserting a position materially adverse to the SOS,” Hobbs wrote in a complaint to the state bar she filed Oct. 1, with a request it be kept confidential.
But the complaint became a subject of open debate at the Legislature on Tuesday as GOP lawmakers cited it as a reason for giving Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, sole authority to represent the state in election-related litigation and prohibit Hobbs from hiring attorneys of her own.
The complaint detailed a few of the cases in which Hobbs and Brnovich have clashed over the past few years amid a flurry of lawsuits over the policies that would govern Arizona’s high stakes election in 2020 and elections in the future.
