AG's Office widens Arizona Corporation Commission investigation

The Arizona Attorney General's Office has expanded its investigation into cozy connections between the Arizona Corporation Commission and Arizona Public Service.

Investigators for several months have been looking into a whistleblower's complaint that former Commissioner Gary Pierce was too chummy with APS brass while he chaired the commission that sets utility rates.

Now they also are looking at Commissioner Bob Stump's texting tendencies with APS, a dark-money group believed to have been funded by APS and a pair of APS-supported candidates who landed on the commission in 2014 with a little help from that dark-money operation.

On Tuesday, Don Conrad, chief of the AG's criminal division, seized Stump's phone from the commission's offices.

ROBERTS: GOP runs interference for Stump and APS

"The investigators working on the ACC complaint felt that there was enough public discussion and enough cause that the phone should be examined and information and data analyzed in conjunction or in relation to the whistleblower complaint," AG spokesman Ryan Anderson told me on Wednesday.

"There have been widespread media reports and public information on what the text messages may or may not have entailed or may have been discussed. So it was determined that that was relevant to the investigation."

Anderson wouldn't say whether the investigation extends to last year's campaign, when a pair of dark-money groups spent more than $3 million to get Tom Forese and Doug Little elected to the five-member commission that regulates utilities. Both the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and Save Our Future Now are suspected of being fronts for APS, which appears to be totally legal – thank you, Arizona Legislature – but completely stinky.

That is, unless you believe that it's a fine idea for utilities to choose the regulators who will decide how much profit they can make – and how much money you will owe when the monthly electric bill arrives.

But back to the AG: "Investigators are taking a very thorough approach and have taken the allegations seriously and through their investigation are exhausting all leads," Anderson said.

Here's where I point out that APS pitched in $425,000 to get Mark Brnovich elected last year. Brnovich has turned the investigation over to Conrad and to his Solicitor General, John Lopez.

For several months, they've been investigating a whistleblower's complaint that Pierce had 14 private lunch and dinner meetings with APS CEO Don Brandt or his predecessor -- seven of which occurred while APS was seeking a rate hike. (Just coincidentally, I'm sure, APS is believed to have spent $750,000 on an unsuccessful dark-money campaign last year to get Pierce's son, Justin, elected secretary of state.)

The whistleblower, a former aide to Pierce, also said that Pierce used him and other staffers to pressure commission employees into expediting incorporation paperwork for a campaign to defeat Commissioners Paul Newman and Sandra Kennedy in 2012. Newman and Kennedy, both Democrats, lost that year to Republicans Susan Bitter Smith, Bob Burns and Bob Stump.

Both Pierce and APS have denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Stump's texting tendencies during the 2014 campaign came under fire several months ago after a pro-solar watchdog group, the Checks and Balances Project, obtained a log of Stump's text messages. The log showed that during the run-up to last year's GOP primary, Stump was repeatedly trading texts with APS executive Barbara Lockwood, Scot Mussi, who runs the dark-money Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Forese, Little and the candidates' campaign manager, Alan Heywood.

Stump has said his texts to Lockwood and Mussi didn't involve politics.

The Corporation Commission has dragged its feet in supplying the texts, first saying that Stump deleted them from his phone and then noting that Stump threw away his commission-supplied phone in October because it was old.

But even if the texts could be retrieved, they wouldn't be public, commission attorney David Cantelme said in a letter last month to Checks and Balances.

In recent weeks and under threat of a lawsuit, the commission has agreed to see if a forensic expert can download the deleted messages from Stump's replacement phone. Before that could happen, however, the AG's Office confiscated the phone.

Meanwhile, APS recently asked the commission to allow it to charge $21 a month to rooftop-solar customers, up from $5.

And won't that be an interesting vote?