The State Bar of Arizona confirmed it’s received two complaints against former Attorney General Mark Brnovich related to reports that he concealed records debunking election fraud claims.
Joe Hengemuehler, the chief communications officer at the Bar, told KJZZ News the agency received two “charges” against Brnovich on Wednesday, “and both are related to the election audit issue.”
Both charges are in a prescreening process, and Hengemuehler could not say who filed the complaints, or the exact nature of the accusations against Brnovich.
According to records released Wednesday by Arizona’s new attorney general, Democrat Kris Mayes, Brnovich ignored the advice and edits of his own staff by releasing the interim report, which was widely criticized at the time as a misleading and inaccurate account of the 2020 election.
As first reported by the Washington Post, Brnovich also withheld two separate reports, prepared while he was still in office, that dismissed claims of voter fraud. Both reports said the claims lacked evidence, were speculative, or in some cases were simply “found to be inaccurate.”
The complaints come amid calls for Brnovich to be disbarred, and could spell professional trouble for the Republican, who’s no stranger to scrutiny from the State Bar.
In 2020, Gov. Katie Hobbs — then Arizona’s secretary of state — filed an ethics complaint with the Bar against Brnovich, alleging the attorney general failed to properly represent the Secretary of State’s Office and mishandled election-related lawsuits. A separate complaint was filed that same year by the Arizona Board of Regents, alleging Brnovich failed to represent the board while also filing lawsuits against the regents.
Brnovich entered into diversion agreements with the state bar, the terms of which are confidential. But doing so allowed him to avoid discipline from the Bar as long as the terms of the diversion agreement were met.
At the time, Brnovich characterized the agreement as a “victory for the rule of law,” while Hobbs and the Board of Regents said it signaled that errors were made by the then attorney general.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a fierce critic of election conspiracy theorists, said that Brnovich’s handling of his staff’s election investigation warrants having his law license revoked.
“The department of law has to be run by an elected official with integrity and honor, and violating that trust is significant,” Fontes said Thursday. “He made material misrepresentations to apparently advance some political something-or-other and he has to be held accountable for that.”
Fontes added that he’s considering filing his own complaint against Brnovich.
“As a member of the Bar myself, I have an affirmative duty to do what every lawyer does, and that is police the profession,” Fontes said. “So I have to take that into account as well.”
