When you are under investigation by the US Attorney General, your attorney might advise that laying low, waiting for the storm to pass, would be in the defendant's best interests. Yet, Thomas and Arpaio continue to seek media attention. Playing to the court of public opinion has worked for them for many years. Will justice be served, or will Arpaio and Thomas continue their political careers with support from the majority?
If the local media investigates and reports misdeeds, if your legal situation is dicey, what do you do? If you are Andrew Thomas, you resign as County Prosecutor and announce as a candidate for State Attorney General. The Maverick Sheriff also refuses to let a little bad publicity get him down. Joe expects to keep the media in suspense as he decides on throwing his hat in the ring for higher office, scoffing at any possibility of criminal charges.
more below the fold
I'll start with the non-announcement by the Sheriff, then a review of a current article in the Phoenix Times, followed by some historical reporting on the abuses of power by Arpaio and Thomas, the decline in popularity ratings for the Sheriff, along with a few bio details.
Phoenix local station KPHO has a video of the latest Arpaio grab for attention. For those who are in the mood for laughter, some dark comedy. (Sorry, maybe someone else can embed the video?) KPHO uses some interesting montages (even stale bologna tastes better when you're wearing pink) for background while the Sheriff speaks.
http://www.kpho.com/...
Arpaio Plans His Political Future (Run for Governor, announcement by May 1st)
Jana Bommersbach is a tenacious investigative reporter, and a noted author. She has been writing for the New Times, the Arizona Republic, and Phoenix Magazine, about this dynamic duo, and their evil deeds since 1992. Her article in the May issue of the Phoenix Magazine should delight Arpaio and Thomas. The timing for her article, shortly after the KPHO story, was not lost on me. Arizona voters pay attention, please.
In her latest article for Phoenix Magazine Jana reports on the legal troubles for Thomas and Arpaio, beginning with the judicial "first smackdown" by Judge McMurray. The article focuses on the inappropriate actions of Arpaio's goon, oops Sergeant at Arms, Acritelli. The Chairman of the County Board of Supervisors, Republican Andrew Kunasek should have received a dishonorable mention for his role.
Citizens scheduled to speak before the County Board, at a public meeting, were arrested before, or as they were called to speak These citizens worked for ACORN and/or an activist pro-immigration organization, Maricopa County Citizens for Safety and Accountability. Their association with these organizations played no part in the arrests, of course.
I would encourage you to read the entire article. It was not possible for this diarist to resist sharing a significant portion.
http://www.phoenixmag.com/...
Judgment Day
Author: Jana Bommersbach
May 2010, page 28
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I thought the worst abuses were focused on county officials, including Supervisors Mary Rose Wilcox and Don Stapley. But then I learned about ordinary citizens who’d felt the same kind of heavy handed assault, arrest and prosecution, and I learned how Judge McMurry gave Thomas and Arpaio their first smackdown.
It was December 17, 2008, about 10 a.m., and the "public comment" portion of the regularly scheduled Board of Supervisors (Maricopa County) meeting was under way. Several people addressed the board. One man sang to them. Much of the audience applauded.
Then Raquel Teran of Maricopa County Citizens for Safety and Accountability (MCCSA) came to the microphone. Her activist group had staged protests for months against Arpaio’s immigration "sweeps" into Hispanic neighborhoods, which seek out illegal immigrants but have ended in several arrests of American citizens who happen to be of Hispanic descent and living here legally. And for at least six months, her group had sought to bring its concerns to the board of supervisors. This public meeting was their first opportunity.
But Teran had a new concern: She wanted the board to know that two days earlier, four women from her group were arrested by sheriff’s deputies while waiting in the supervisor’s offices to see Supervisor Andrew Kunasek, the northeast Valley Republican who chairs the board. In this audience were some of those arrested women, who’d been released on their own recognizance, including Kristy Theilen and Monica Sandschafer, who both work for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and are active in MCCSA.
"It is now a crime in Maricopa County for a citizen to sit on a chair in a public building in a public lobby waiting for the opportunity to speak to the chairman of the board," Teran lamented. "Nobody likes a bully, and we will not be bullied."
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He then called the next speaker, Kristy Theilen. As she made her way to the podium, a sheriff’s deputy grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back, telling her, "Miss, you’re not speaking, you’re leaving." At the same time, deputies arrested three other members of MCCSA from the crowd, singling them out from among the two dozen or so who had stood and applauded.
As Theilen was led away, Kunasek called the next speaker, Monica Sandschafer, but she was already getting arrested.
"I’m not being allowed to address you," she told the board, and then admonished, "Is this how you run your county? Please stop this." Kunasek called her name a second time. "That’s me, sir," she yelled back as a sheriff’s deputy led her out of the room.
The only member of the board of supervisors to voice any concern was Mary Rose Wilcox. "Andy (Kunasek), this is getting crazy," she said.
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Judge McMurry not only set the protesters free, he said he wanted to underscore how wrong this all was by making the county attorney pay their legal fees. He asked both sides to submit written memos on the payment.
Things only got worse after that. On November 30, after getting the memos from the county attorney’s office, Judge McMurry went ballistic. He wrote that he was so "startled" by how the county attorney had distorted the events that he went back and "reviewed anew all the recordings submitted in this action in their entirety."
On the audiotape, Kristy Theilen is heard referring to the actions of Deputy Acritelli "as those of a ‘fascist,’" the judge noted.
But he concluded that it wasn’t Theilen or anyone else trying to address the board that "disrupted" the meeting; it was Sergeant Acritelli doing the disrupting, and he called it "perverse" to arrest someone who is being called forward to speak at a public meeting.
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Thank you Jana Boomersbach for all that you do. She's not a lone ranger reporting on these Maricopa County scalawags, the editorial staff at KPHO deserves recognition for their efforts as well.
KPHO has an excellent cross reference of stories and videos they have published while conducting their own investigations of Thomas and Arpaio. I have pulled a few to give the reader a timeline of the abuses of power.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon is no stranger to the Sheriff's abuse of power, himself a target. Many other sources requested their names be withheld, fearing retaliation.
http://www.kpho.com/...
Source Calls Deputies' Visits Intimidation
POSTED: 12:49 pm MST December 14, 2009
PHOENIX -- Detectives from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's Organized Crime Division showed up at the homes of about a dozen county and Superior Court employees to ask questions about the court tower project, according to a source inside county government.
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Deputies asked them what they knew about the court tower; whether they had been told not to talk; and who their attorney is, among others.
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This isn't the first time the Sheriff's Office has been accused of intimidation; over the past several months, county employees, Maricopa County Supervisors and private citizens told 5 Investigates they were targeted with investigations after they or their employer did something with which Sheriff Joe Arpaio disagreed.
Several of them, including Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, said they spoke with FBI agents about their experiences as part of an abuse-of-power investigation into the Sheriff's Office.
In the following news article KPHO reports on the decline in the Sheriff's approval ratings. This is good news only if the other 61 percent of voters actually vote in the next election.
http://www.kpho.com/...
Protest, Grand Jury Challenge Joe Arpaio
POSTED: 8:37 am MST March 1, 2010
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Today, however, some indicators have changed for the 77-year-old lawman -- and it's not just the marching in the streets.
His soaring approval ratings dropped to 39 percent in one recent poll. Critics are emboldened by a federal grand jury that's examining abuse-of-power allegations against him and a second federal investigation that he says focuses on his immigration enforcement.
Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, the top Maricopa County prosecutor and a chief ally, face intense criticism for mounting what many people see as a political blood feud. They filed criminal charges against two county supervisors and the county's presiding criminal judge, and they've also ignited a spate of costly lawsuits. Arpaio and Thomas say they can't ignore credible allegations of corruption.
The charges against one supervisor were dismissed by a judge on Feb. 24. Thomas said he would seek to have charges against the other two officials dismissed and planned to turn the three investigations over to special prosecutors.
County Manager David Smith said sheriff's investigators went to the homes of 70 county and court staffers on nights and weekends last year in an attempt to intimidate.
The Sheriff seems to be on a media roll moving into March 2010, "if it weren't for bad luck he'd have no luck at all". The gambler seems to have lost on another toss of the dice. Pesky isn't it that emails you thought you destroyed pop up where you least expect it? How's a mere sanction going to deter this gunslinger? The article closes with a short bio of the Sheriff, he learned a thing or two from his years of association (aka drug enforcement) with drug cartels in Turkey and Mexico.
http://www.kpho.com/...
Arpaio, Supes Face Off Over E-Mail
Sheriff Shouldn't Turn E-Mail Issue Into 'Grudge Match,' Attorney Says
Cara Liu
Reporter, KPHO.com
POSTED: 10:08 am MST March 8, 2010
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The controversy centers around archived e-mail that could be key in a high-profile racial profiling lawsuit, Melendres v. Arpaio, where sheriff’s deputies are accused of illegally targeting Latinos during Arpaio's controversial crime sweeps.
Arpaio’s deputies have admitted to destroying statistics sheets from the crime sweeps and deleting e-mail messages. A federal judge sanctioned Arpaio for destroying e-mail and other evidence. The lawsuit has also brought Arpaio and one of his chief deputies to depositions.
Many assumed the e-mail messages were gone forever until county officials discovered they had a back-up copy. A Board of Supervisors representative said they archived the e-mail as required for a different legal matter
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He wasn't always Sheriff Joe.
After a stint in the Army, the native of Springfield, Mass., worked as a police officer in Washington and Las Vegas until he was hired by the federal agency that would become the Drug Enforcement Administration.
He went to Turkey to try to infiltrate opium producers, made stops in San Antonio, Baltimore and Boston, and became a regional director in Mexico City, where his job was to persuade Latin American governments to go after traffickers. His final stop was as the DEA boss in Arizona.
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The Sheriff's sidekick, Thomas would not stoop to filling lawsuits, without merit, simply to retaliate over those pesky emails retrieved by the County Board? Or was it relieving the County Attorney's Office of that $6M kitty for Arpaio's legal defense that brought on the demonstration of the "long arm of the law" ?
http://www.kpho.com/...
Thomas Drops RICO Lawsuit Against Supes
POSTED: 1:18 pm MST March 11, 2010
PHOENIX -- Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio have dropped their racketeering lawsuit against the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, according to a court motion filed Thursday.
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The suit, which was filed at the beginning of December, accused the defendants of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to hinder an investigation into the $341 million criminal court tower under construction in downtown Phoenix and the ongoing investigation of county Supervisor Don Stapley.
Thomas and Arpaio named all five members of the Board of Supervisors as defendants along with County Manager David Smith, Deputy County Manager Sandi Wilson, four current or former judges, the director of Maricopa County's civil-litigation division, two private attorneys and a law firm.
The suit claimed that county administrators conspired to deprive Arpaio of his right to legal representation from the County Attorney's Office when the county created a civil-litigation division, and in the process, took $6 million and staff members from Thomas' office to create the new division.
So, when is Sheriff Joe finally going to get the justice he deserves? I'll admit, the prospect of Joe in pink underwear is smashed when we're talking Federal indictments.
http://www.kpho.com/...
AG: Arpaio Probe Serious, Ongoing
POSTED: 6:56 am MST March 26, 2010
PHOENIX -- An investigation into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is serious and ongoing, according to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
Holder said he expects the probe conducted by Justice Department's civil rights division and the Arizona U.S. attorney's office "will produce results." Holder made the remarks during a visit to Phoenix to attend a mortgage fraud task force meeting on Thursday.
The fate of many decent citizens, and saving the entire misguided masses who support Arpaio and Thomas from the worst government has to offer, depends on a judicial system that can deliver a criminal indictment, convict and punish those who abuse power. If this does not happen, it will reinforce the perception that justice does not prevail, that there are indeed those who are above and beyond the law.
Arpaio fans may justify their support for him by claiming that the liberal media, and the President's AG are unjustly targeting the duo. Arizonians who continue to support corrupt politicians should admit that they have abandoned any moral high ground. That they are blind to the truth. That they are showing their children, by example, it is OK to admire those in government who practice criminal behavior.
As always, I appreciate your comments and will respond later today.