Corp Com says nothing to see in texts to APS et al? Prove it

It is Arizona's most fascinating whodunit story of the summer – or more accurately, what will it take to undunit.

A state regulator regularly sends text messages to a utility executive, a pair of utility-friendly commission candidates and the head of a dark-money group suspected of fronting for the utility during election season.

He then routinely deletes the texts.

Then he deletes his state-supplied phone, by throwing it away.

Hmmmm.

For months now, a Washington D.C. watchdog group has been trying to get a look at text messages Arizona Corporation Commissioner Bob Stump sent during last year's campaign to fill two commission seats.

Alas, the Corporation Commission says it can't provide records of Stump's messages because they no longer exist.

And even if they did exist, the commission's attorney believes, based on the content, that they wouldn't be public records.

Never mind that the attorney has never actually read them.

Because they don't exist.

Or, as it turns out, do they?

Thus begins the latest chapter in the epic tale of the Arizona Corporation Commission and its curious relationship with Arizona Public Service. It's a page turner that just may raise your blood pressure – and eventually, your electricity bill.

You already know much of the story, how APS is widely believed to have secretly funded a multi-million-dollar dark-money campaign last year to get Tom Forese and Doug Little elected to the five-member commission that sets electricity rates – the five who essentially determine how much money APS will make.

Of course, it would be entirely legal for APS to covertly fund a campaign to choose its regulators, thanks to an Arizona Legislature that has no interest in requiring disclosure of such things. Yet APS executives won't say whether or not they funded the independent dark-money campaign that successfully landed Forese and Little spots on the commission.

Also curious? The fact that no corporation commissioner has ordered APS to open its books to see how it's spending ratepayer money. Any one commissioner could singlehandedly put this issue to rest and restore the commission's credibility. That is, assuming the board hasn't become a wholly-owned subsidiary of APS.

Then there is the matter of Bob Stump's text messages.

Checks and Balances Project -- a watchdog blog that advocates for clean energy policies and is itself largely funded by dark money – has been seeking Stump's text messages for several months. This spring, it obtained cell phone logs that show Stump, during the month's leading up to last year's primary election, was madly texting Forese and Little, as well as an APS executive and a dark-money group that ran an independent campaign for the pair.

Independent campaigns can spend as much as they want to get somebody elected (or defeated) but it would be illegal for independent campaigns to coordinate with the candidates they seek to get elected.

The logs beg the question: did Stump act as a go-between?

According to the logs, Stump sent 56 text messages to APS executive Barbara Lockwood between June and September 2014 and 46 to Scot Mussi, head of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. He sent nearly 180 texts to Forese and Little, who enjoyed a total of $3.2 million in independent dark-money support from AzFEC and a second dark-money group, Save Our Future Now.

Naturally, the question arises: what was Stump communicating in all those texts?

Cue the Corporation Commission, which last week admitted that Stump routinely deleted all his text messages (and to heck, apparently, with the public records law). Then he disposed of his state-supplied phone in October. Because it was old.

The commission's recently hired attorney, David Cantelme, assured Checks and Balances that Stump deleted commission-related texts from his phone "consistent with Arizona law and applicable document-retention protocols."

I'm not sure how Cantelme can say that it was legal for Stump to delete those messages, given that the lawyer admits that he never actually saw what was in those messages.

But onward.

"Obviously, the messages that were once hosted on Commissioner Stump's iphone3 cannot be retrieved under any circumstances, because the device itself no longer exists," Cantelme wrote.

Or can they?

Late last week, Checks and Balances issued the Corporation Commission an ultimatum: produce Stump's replacement phone or face a lawsuit next week.

"The commission can get these messages,'' Checks and Balances' Scott Peterson said. "They just don't want anyone to see them.''

The watchdog group has hired a digital forensic expert who says he can undo this mess, that he can retrieve the deleted messages from Stump's new phone.

This should be fantastic news to Stump, who has said that his 56 messages to APS's Lockwood weren't about politics and that his 46 messages to Mussi were about setting up a trip to the symphony.

Both Stump and the commission have said there's nothing to see here.

Now comes their chance to prove it