Disbarment urged for GOP Arizona AG who hid Trump-debunking election fraud report
Reacting to a Washington Post report that showed that former Arizona Attorney General Attorney General of Arizona Mark Brnovich speaking at the 2019 Inauguration of Governor Doug Ducey (R) misrepresented and then buried a report that affirmed there was no election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, two legal experts asserted that he should face legal sanctions including disbarment.
Writing for the Bulwark, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut and Amherst law professor Austin Sarat stated that Brnovich should be held accountable for misusing his office to keep the election fraud conspiracy alive going into the 2022 midterms when he was running for the GOP Senate nomination.
As the Post reported, "The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his team privately disregarded fact checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence in the 2020 vote as well as in subsequent elections."
According to Aftergut and Sarat, "Brnovich systematically misrepresented what his investigators found. And then he compounded the misrepresentations by hiding their findings. Plainly, he did so because his office’s findings disproved the election denialist claims that he was running on in his (failed) Senate primary campaign against Blake Masters."
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For that, they wrote, he should be held investigated and held accountable by Arizona's bar.
"It appears that bar authorities in New York, D.C., and California are moving to bring accountability to Trump lawyers such as Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark. State bar rules of professional responsibility expose any lawyer who engages in dishonest conduct to discipline, including suspension or disbarment," they wrote.
They continued, "Brnovich should face the same consequences so that in the future, lawyers whom the people choose to serve them will understand that they do not have the option of serving themselves by hiding politically unpalatable findings," before adding, "The public trust that is invested in our elected officials is democracy’s most sacred asset. An assault upon it ought never be tolerated or ignored."
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