The director of the Clean Elections Commission told the Arizona Supreme Court that two Green Party candidates being investigated for campaign finance fraud are working to “recklessly vilify public servants” through their lawsuit against the commission. Tom Collins, executive director of the Clean Elections Commission, said in response to the candidates’ petition to the Arizona Supreme Court, “Snide soundbites, cloaked in hyperbolic opinion and lacking actual evidence, should not be strewn about recklessly.” “Legal arguments do not require this approach to be persuasive or to make their point. This approach should be condemned.”
Last week, the state’s highest court agreed to consider the case after a trial court dismissed it and the Arizona Court of Appeals declined to hear it. Risa Lombardo and Duwayne Collier, the Green Party nominees for governor and secretary of state, are asking the courts to preemptively block the Citizens Clean Elections Commission from ordering them to repay millions in public campaign funds. Lombardo, Collier and Republican Scott Neely, who lost his primary for governor to Andy Biggs, are all under civil investigation by the Clean Elections Commission and criminal investigation by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office for accusations that they falsified documentation for enough $5 contributions from voters to qualify for a collective $4.7 million in public campaign funds.
In August, the Arizona Mirror exclusively reported that six people who were listed in campaign finance records as having made $5 contributions to all three candidates were adamant they didn’t give any money to the candidates. On the same day, Collins sent letters to the three candidates, informing them of the Clean Elections investigation into their campaign finances and warning them that they may be required to repay all or some of the money. Two weeks later, Lombardo and Collier filed their lawsuit against the commission, asking a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to block the commission from forcing them to return the money. Judge Melissa Iyer Julian dismissed the lawsuit, saying it was brought too early, before the commission’s investigation was complete and before its members made any repayment decisions.
In the lawsuit, Tim La Sota, an attorney for Lombardo and Collier and a former lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party, accused Collins of targeting them for political reasons in an effort to halt their campaigns, pointing to Collins’ description of them as “sham” candidates in his letters. But that wasn’t his opinion – rather, he was quoting the Arizona Green Party, which initially described Lombardo and Collier as “sham” candidates. That’s because they had no connection to their registered party and numerous ties to the Republican Party.
In their petition to the Arizona Supreme Court, Lombardo and Collier wrote that Collins “told both Candidates that he would do everything he could to have the Clean Elections Commission order the Candidates repay every single penny that had been provided them when they qualified for funding.” In his response to the high court, Collins said that was a lie, and the public record confirms it. “There is no evidence anywhere such a thing was ever said,” Craig Morgan, an attorney for Collins, wrote. “His letters certainly say no such thing. It is an unsupported misstatement intended only to impugn the Director’s honesty and integrity and inflame the reader – which is not only this Court, but includes the public.” Both Collins and the Clean Elections Commission asked the high court to decline to hear the case, to affirm the lower court ruling that the lawsuit had been filed prematurely or to find that the court has no authority to interfere with the
