The Arizona Board of Regents, which governs the state’s universities, has filed a complaint against Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich with the Arizona State Bar, saying he cannot sue them or to criticize them in public because he is supposed to defend state agencies.
The complaint, filed last year but revealed Monday, is the second such effort, following a similar complaint by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a hyper-partisan Democrat who once referred to President Donald Trump’s voting base as “neo-Nazi.”
The complaints cite ethical rules that govern the conduct of attorneys. Typically, lawyers cannot sue their clients except in limited circumstances, and are not permitted to criticize their clients in public. If lawyers represent interests adverse to those of their clients, current or former, they can only do so with the written and informed consent of those clients. But Brnovich, who is an elected public official, is also responsible for enforcing the law and expected to take positions on state governance.
At issue in the Regents’ case are a set of lawsuits from 2019, one over tuition costs and the other over real estate deals. At the time, the Regents complained that Brnovich had “sued his own client.” Brnovich, who called the Regents “a bunch of gimmicky yobs,” said he was entitled to sue state agencies, citing a case he won against community colleges and universities that offered in-state tuition benefits to illegal aliens in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Left-wing groups have lately adopted a tactic of filing Bar complaints against opposing attorneys in high-profile cases, notably the 2020 election challenges. As Breitbart News reported last year, left-wing activists and attorneys, encouraged in some cases by the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, harassed Trump’s election lawyers and threatened actions to disbar them.
Brnovich was skeptical at the time of Trump’s claims of election fraud in Arizona, pushing back publicly against them.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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