Arizona Morning Briefing 9-2: Sunshine Scope Widens, Lombardo Campaign Finance Plot Thickens, Park Officials Try to Figure Out What Went Wrong In the Canyon, and more

Arizona Globe goes on a brief side quest to visit the set of Jeopardy! in Los Angeles, and news just breaks out all over. Here’s a brief rundown of the stories we’ll be following this week and beyond. As Lloyd Bridges once said in Airplane!, “Looks like I picked a hell of a week to quit sniffing glue!”

•Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office confirmed Sept. 1 that it’s conducting a criminal investigation into Green Party gubernatorial nominee Risa Lombardo, Green secretary-of-state nominee Duwayne Collier and failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Neely over the allegedly bogus $5 contributions that unlocked more than $4.7 million in public campaign money. Arizona Clean Elections already has subpoena authority and ordered Executive Director Tom Collins to complete the repayment investigation and make recommendations as early as Sept. 24 and no later than Oct. 29. Lombardo is potentially on the hook for $2.8 million of the money.

On Monday, the Arizona Green Party formally asked Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to remove Lombardo and Collier from the November ballot and substitute its preferred write-in candidates. Fontes’ office says he can’t do that unilaterally—the nominees would have to withdraw or a court would have to order their removal. Clean Elections says its current investigation is about whether the candidates could receive the funds, but no one has filed an official complaint to disqualify them. We’d suggest starting a petition, but at this point it’s too late anyway, and aren’t petitions how we got into this mess in the first place?

•At this point Governor Katie Hobbs finds herself ever regretting having let the Sunshine in. Sunshine Resisdential, that is. Even though The Attorney General has cleared the Governor of criminal wrongdoing in the campaign-finance scandal involving Sunshine, this week brought fresh revelations that the company contributed another $150,000 to Hobbs’ legal-defense fund in 2023 and 2024, after Hobbs took office and after Sunshine received the rate increases at the center of the investigation.

Hobbs refuses to identify the fund’s other donors and intends to keep raising undisclosed legal-defense money in anticipation of possible 2026 election litigation. The fund isn’t even a formal separate entity; Hobbs attorney Andrew Yost described it as money that Coopersmith Brockelman holds in its trust account for the benefit of the inaugural fund and campaign committee. Nicole DeMont, who runs both Hobbs’ reelection operation and the still-active inaugural organization, approached Sunshine’s Abi Saifi for the $150,000, according to Capitol Media Services. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are claiming that Sunshine attempted to bribe former Department of Child Safety director Mike Faust (a Doug Ducey appointee) with a recommendation that Hobbs’ administration keep him on if Faust agreed to approve a rate increase for the company. Faust says he declined and reported the alleged offer to other senior department officials. This is all part of a larger conspiracy, House Speaker Steve Montenegro said in a letter to Attorney General Mayes. “Those failures raise the specter that your Memorandum was intended to influence the November election by attempting to inoculate the Governor from a perceived political vulnerability,” he wrote.

•Secretary of State Fontes responded to a Postal Service whistleblower who’s warning about a mail-in ballot disaster this fall. The whistleblower says USPS built its new Federal Ballot Mail Portal in roughly three months without adequate testing and that under its proposed batch-processing system, one error in a batch containing tens of thousands of ballots could potentially stop the delivery of the entire batch. “This is more confirmation of what my office and myself have been concerned about—that it will be virtually impossible for the USPS to actually implement this rule effectively for the November 3 midterm election and the result will be the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans who vote by mail,” Fontes said in a statement. What could possibly go wrong?

•National Park officials are saying that newly installed Bright Angel Creek flood-warning gauges went offline as last week’s Grand Canyon flood surged. Deputy Superintendent Brian Drapeaux said the park ultimately learned what was happening through 911 calls and reports from people on the ground. Debris may have knocked out the gauges; NPS says it will investigate. The separate Coconino County/National Weather Service satellite-alert system did remain functional and sent six messages.

•The state Supreme Court heard ABOR Vs. Anderson on September 1. ASU Professor Owen Anderson, represented by the Goldwater Institute, is suing the school for requiring him to attend DEI training, saying it violates state law banning the requirement of any employees to “engage in training, orientation or therapy that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” “Blaming, judging, or mistreating people for who they are or what they believe is the exact opposite of the training’s message,” said the Arizona Board of Regents in a motion to dismiss. The court appears divided, hasn’t announced a decision date, and is probably brewing a second pot of coffee.