Opinion: “An error on my part”
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That was quick. One day after an Arizona sheriff sent deputies to arrest the owners of a Phoenix alternative news weekly for disclosing the invasive contents of a grand-jury subpoena, the county attorney dropped the charges and canceled the investigation that gave birth to the subpoena.
At a press conference Friday, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas made it clear that there’s no love lost between himself and the Phoenix New Times, which has been a stinging critic. But he also said that he wasn’t aware of the subpoena or the arrests until a subordinate called him Thursday night, after New Times owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin had been jailed. (Lacey and Larkin wrote the story that disclosed the contents of the subpoena.) And he blamed himself for the, umm, overly aggressive lawyering by special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik, who had been his boss at a private law firm before Thomas won the county attorney’s race. Said Thomas:
In looking at this matter in its totality over the last 24 hours, it has become clear to me that the investigation has gone in a direction that I would not have authorized. It was an error on my part to allow the matter to proceed to that point without having the proper, without basically having personnel in place to ensure we didn’t go off track.
By ‘off track,’ he was most likely referring to the subpoena’s request for virtually every scrap of personal information about all visitors to the New Times website since Jan. 1, 2004. Yeah, that’s a bit off the rails. Thomas said he’d canned Wilenchik as a special prosecutor on the New Times case and other work, including a controversial attack on a Maricopa County Superior Court judge they accused of being soft on illegal immigrants. Not that he had any regrets about the latter action, either; he said he had a First Amendment right to criticize judges, just as New Times has free-speech rights worth defending.
And when he said ‘defending,’ Thomas meant keeping the weekly safe from his own office. The New Times’ alleged crime? Violating a state law by publishing online Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s home address, which also happens to be available online from government sources and other sites. The address was divulged, by the way, in an editorial pegged to a story alleging that Arpaio used the state law in question to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of additional real estate he owned.
Arpaio has used Wilenchik as a special prosecutor, too. ‘Will he continue to represent the Sheriff? I’m not prepared to say,’ Thomas said at his press conference Friday, adding, ‘He has represented the county effectively in other areas, and Dennis is an excellent lawyer.’