Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007...7:27 am
Doubting Thomas
It looks like folks in the Phoenix media are not buying Andrew Thomas’s excuse that he didn’t know what Dennis Willenchick was acting entirely on his own and Thomas didn’t know he was going to go and have the owners of the New Times arrested.
Come on guys, do you expect Thomas to actually run his office?
The most obvious problem here is that Thomas is admitting that even his close aide is out of his control. But, I don’t know why we should believe that, given how long this action has been going, and the other unhinged actions that have come out of his office.
Thomas must have known, for example, that Willenchick tried to arrange for an ex parte meeting with Judge Anna Baca. Carol Turoff, who served on the body that appointed four of the current Arizona Supreme Court justices and wife of a member of Thomas’s team, made a call to Baca to ask that she meet with Willenchick. Even the most casual viewer of Law and Order (or heck, Matlock) knows that such a request is way out of line. Baca publicly scolded Willenchick. If Thomas was worried that his boy was crossing some lines, he probably should have done something then.
(Willenchick, by the way, said later that the request was “appropriate.”)
Thomas himself has crossed lines. At his most whack-jobbed, he tried to have all 93 Maricopa County judges removed for bias. Needless to say, this request was denied.
There’s a pattern here, and I don’t think it is that much of a stretch to say that this guy is arrogant enough to think he could get away with arresting reporters (reporters, whose paper, by the way, was poking around trying to find out how RICO money was being spent and has been the only one going after Thomas ally Joe Arpaio). Thomas only releneted when this started attracting national attention. It is chilling to think what he could get away with if these two he arrested weren’t so prominent.
NB - Willenchick was the prosecutor on the bizarre “bribery” (bribery defined as state madated fees) against Terry Goddard. What happens to this case now?
3 Comments
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:45 am
“It is chilling to think what he could get away with if these two he arrested weren’t so prominent.”
Ask about the many crackdowns on prosecutions and the high trial rates….the war on illegal immigrants and so on.
On this one I suspect bar complaints…wait until he gets investyigated for once.
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:21 pm
love the l&o reference. ha
October 23rd, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Willenchick is also the attorney who was hired to prosecute Trish Groe, the representative from Lake Havasu City who was apprehended driving extremely drunk on a suspended driver’s license. I wonder what impact this will have on that case.
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