Was Bob Stump channeling his inner Tom Horne?

Shades of Tom Horne, the Clean Elections Commission is asking questions about Corporation Commissioner Bob Stump's email.

Checks and Balances Project, a non-profit that advocates for clean energy policies, this week disclosed phone logs that call into question whether Stump acted as a go-between in order to coordinate activities between Arizona Public Service, a pair of APS-friendly candidates and a dark-money independent campaign widely believed to have been funded by APS.

According to the logs, Stump was madly texting Tom Forese and Doug Little during the run-up to last year's election, along with an APS executive and the head of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, which spent nearly $450,000 on an independent campaign aimed at getting the pair elected to the commission that regulates utilities.

Stump has said there's nothing to see here.

Clean Elections Executive Director Tom Collins is seeking to verify whether that's true. On Wednesday, he asked Checks and Balances for copies of the phone logs it obtained through a public-records request.. Both Forese and Little ran with public funding, as Clean Elections candidates.

Collins says he wants to determine whether an investigation is warranted.

"We want to look at whether to look at whether there's any kind of coordinating between a participating candidate and an otherwise independent entity making expenditures in that race," he told me.

Independent campaigns can spend as much as they want to get somebody elected (or defeated) – and sadly, the dark-money campaigns don't have to disclose the source of their funding -- but it is illegal for independent campaigns to coordinate with the candidates they seek to get elected.

Just as ask former Attorney General Tom Horne, who got nailed for coordinating with an independent campaign that poured money into his 2010 election. He's been ordered to refund more than $400,000 in donations to the independent committee that put out a last-minute attack ad on opponent Felecia Rotellini, allowing Horne to win a squeaker of a race. Horne has denied any wrongdoing. He contends that his many phone calls to the person running the independent campaign on the day she was finalizing her attack ad were to talk about real estate.

Stump, likewise, has said his calls were unrelated to Forese and Little's campaign.. Mussi, he said, is an old friend and they were simply trying to coordinate a trip to the symphony.

According to Checks & Balances, Stump used his state phone to text AzFEC president Scot Mussi while curiously also texting Forese, Little and their campaign manager, Alan Heywood.

Evan Wyloge, reporter for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, overlaid the calls with AzFEC's spending on its campaign for Little and Forese and came up with some interesting coincidences.

Here's a partial timeline Wyloge put together:

July 23: Mussi's group spends $97,000 on mailers for Forese and Little.

July 24: Stump and Mussi trade eight texts, and Stump and Little exchanged 17 texts.

July 25: Stump exchanges 18 texts with the candidates' campaign manager, Heywood. It was the first time the two had texted since May 1.

Evening of July 25 and morning of July 26: Stump and Mussi texted five times and Stump and Forese texted four times.

July 28: Mussi's AzFEC spends another $64,000 on mailers for Forese and Little.

In all, the logs show Stump sent 56 emails to Barbara Lockwood, an APS executive between June and September and 46 to Mussi. He sent about 180 to Forese and Little, who enjoyed $3.2 million in dark money support from AzFEC and another dark-money group believed to have gotten funds from APS.

Not surprisingly, the pair was easily elected to the commission that regulates utilities.