Bob Stump takes aim at watchdog (and scores a direct hit)

Arizona Corporation Commissioner Bob Stump is complaining about tactics used by a government watchdog group seeking access to his text messages.

Stump -- who was curiously unavailable to talk with me this week about his mad texting tendencies with Arizona Public Service, a dark-money group believed to be funded by APS and a former APS consultant known as the maestro of dark money -- cried foul to The Republic's Ryan Randazzo.

This, after the Checks and Balances Project on Tuesday posted online the names and phone numbers of those whom Stump texted most often last year, as well as a log of every phone number to which Stump sent a text message.

Checks and Balances has for months been trying to get access to those messages. The group – which advocates for clean energy policies and is itself largely funded by dark money -- is asking all the right questions about what Stump was doing during the run-up to last year's election to fill two seats on the five-member commission.

The central question: Was Stump acting as a go-between between APS, two APS-favored commission candidates, and a dark money group that is widely believed to have campaigned for those candidates using funds quietly supplied by APS?

If so, that would be a no-no.

Even if not, the sheer number of texts calls into question Stump's seemingly cozy relationship with the utility he's supposed to be regulating.

But publishing every phone number the guy ever texted?

I'm with Stump on this one. That was out of line and it borders on being a bully.

"It's one thing to attack a public figure," Stump told Randazzo. "I expect it. It is quite another to publish the names and numbers of his family members and friends, none of whom signed up for this."

Checks and Balances executive director Scott Peterson told me on Wednesday afternoon that he's willing to remove the names and phone numbers of Stump's family and friends with whom he had strictly personal business.

"We've informed (Commission attorney David) Cantelme that we'll remove any names that are improper but this is a distraction," he said.

Sadly, I fear legislators will likely remember that Checks and Balances used the public records law to obtain those cell phone numbers.

When it comes to public access to government records, nothing good can come from that.