PHOENIX

Records: MCSO spent $120K on probe involving fed judge

Megan Cassidy
The Republic | azcentral.com
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

At least one high-ranking member of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's administration expressed doubts about a discredited informant's investigation into a conspiracy theory involving a federal judge and the Department of Justice — a probe that would ultimately cost the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office more than $100,000.

Newly released records offer a window into the increasingly contentious relationship between the Sheriff's Office and Dennis Montgomery, a Seattle-based computer programmer. MCSO hired Montgomery after he alleged he could prove the DOJ was tapping the phones of Arpaio and U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow, who is presiding over a class-action racial-profiling case against the agency.

ROBERTS: Arpaio spent $120K on conspiracy theory and got ... cable TV

Arpaio acknowledged his agency's relationship with Montgomery in bombshell testimony this April, during a hearing designed to address separate contempt-of-court allegations stemming from the racial-profiling suit. Arpaio readily admitted that Montgomery's information was "junk."

But correspondence among Montgomery, some of Arpaio's top commanders and Montgomery's attorney indicates that detectives had doubts dating to at least June 2014 about whether Montgomery had anything to offer.

Sheriff's Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan was particularly concerned that Montgomery's investigation into Justice Department phone-tapping allegations could come back to hurt the sheriff's efforts to come to terms with Snow, who is overseeing efforts to eradicate racial profiling in the agency.

Montgomery, in late June 2014, noted that Sheridan said he didn't want to "go in front of Snow and be accused of retaliating against the Judge."

Those concerns would prove to be prescient — Snow has come to see the investigation as part of an effort to discredit him — but the Sheriff's Office would go on to spend at least $120,000 and months more on the investigation after Sheridan first raised his concerns.

"After reviewing all the hard drivers our experts concluded that Dennis Montgomery deliberately compiled massive amounts of data on to these drives for the purpose of obfuscating the fact the data itself contained no evidence to support Dennis Montgomery's claims," one e-mail states.

E-mails additionally suggest the agency continued to fund Montgomery's investigations even after Sheriff's Office experts had discredited 50 to 60 hard drives of information Montgomery previously provided.

MCSO and its attorneys did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

The newly released correspondence begins June 29, 2014, with Montgomery expressing confusion about what he was tasked to do.

"On one hand, (a sheriff's official) tells not to produce information on Judge SNOW," he writes. "Then I am attacked for not producing information on Judge Snow."

By November 2014, Detective Brian Mackiewicz wrote e-mails to Montgomery's attorney, Larry Klayman, in which he said that deputies had yet to receive any credible information from Montgomery after 13 months and $120,000.

Sheriff's experts, in a letter to Klayman, confirmed that none of Montgomery's information was credible.

"Our experts determined that much of the information that Dennis Montgomery has alleged that was harvested by the federal government in violation of the fourth amendment protections cannot be sourced for validity based on the information contained in the 50 hard drives Dennis Montgomery provided," the e-mail states.

ARPAIO THROUGH THE YEARS

Instead, Mackiewicz said, the drives contained "data dumps" of video feeds from the Al Jazeera network. E-mails also say the agency attempted to secure Montgomery "whistleblower" status, bringing him before the Arizona attorney general.

By April, Mike Zullo, a volunteer with the Sheriff's Posse who spearheaded the agency's attempt to investigate President Barack Obama's birth certificate, wrote to Montgomery that the agency had recently paid him an additional $15,000, as was contractually required, but had still received no credible information.

"Sixteen long months of ZEROs and just empty promises and lip service," he wrote.

Zullo said there would be one final chance for Montgomery to honor his agreement with the Sheriff's Office.

By then, the Sheriff's Office was in hot water with Snow over the Montgomery probe: Snow, in an April contempt hearing, ordered Arpaio's attorneys to turn over documents related to Montgomery's investigations.