Mayes won’t appeal ruling that her office broke public records law over Judicial Watch request

An appellate court ruled that Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’s office broke the law when it gave a conservative advocacy group almost no information about dozens of emails and documents it said weren’t public records.

The court also found that the Attorney General’s Office failed to justify redacting names from one document and inadequately searched for the records that Judicial Watch sought.

“It’s an important ruling and exposes the gamesmanship we’ve had to go through to expose the relationships we’ve been investigating,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Arizona Mirror. “It’s such a waste of taxpayer resources.”

Richie Taylor, a spokesman for Mayes, said the AG’s Office won’t appeal the ruling.

“We disagree with the court’s analysis, but we will abide by the ruling and produce a more detailed privilege log for review by the trial court and plaintiffs as required by the ruling,” he said in an emailed statement.

In December 2024, Judicial Watch filed a public records request seeking communications between Mayes’s office and States United Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for democracy and fair elections, stretching back to Jan. 1, 2020. The request also sought documents and communications with Voter Protection Program, a predecessor organization to States United.

The next month, the AG’s Office turned over some records, but also informed Judicial Watch that some records had been withheld because they were either subject to attorney-client privilege or were attorney work product, and therefore weren’t subject to the public records law.

In February 2025, Judicial Watch sued and accused Mayes’s office of not turning over records “promptly,” as Arizona law requires, and failing to provide an index of the records it withheld, something the law allows and that Judicial Watch requested. After the lawsuit was filed, the AG’s Office supplied an index.

A trial court judge concluded that the AG’s Office complied with Arizona public records law and dismissed the lawsuit.

But the Arizona Court of Appeals said that judge got it wrong: the index of withheld records was too vague to be of any use in determining whether the documents were privileged, one document was unreasonably redacted and the office didn’t actually search for all the records Judicial Watch sought.

The index covered 50 records that Mayes’s office claimed were privileged, but included only two entries: emails from AG’s attorneys to States United attorneys and email from States United’s attorneys to the AG’s attorneys. It did not include any other information, such as dates, names of senders or recipients or any description of the emails or their attachments. 

And that doesn’t meet the standard the Arizona Supreme Court set in a 2022 ruling that privilege logs “must contain more than generalities,” Judge Jeffrey Sklar wrote for the three-judge appellate panel in its unanimous ruling.

Some detail must be provided in such indexes, the Supreme Court held, to shed some light on whether a privilege is being improperly applied to materials that should be public record. 

“Here, the index provided by the attorney general’s office supplies no context about the withheld emails that would allow a court or any other party to determine if a privilege applies,” Sklar wrote.

In one of the records that Mayes’s office did turn over to Judicial Watch, it redacted the names of every States United employee. The trial judge didn’t analyze if there was a legal reason to redact those names, and the appellate court said she should have because an attorney’s name “generally falls outside the privilege’s protections” and shouldn’t be redacted.

Finally, the court concluded that the AG’s Office failed to search for all of the documents that Judicial Watch sought: Instead of searching for records dating back to 2020, it only looked at records beginning in January 2023, when Mayes took office. The office’s public records employee testified that, because the records request was related to Mayes’s prosecution of “fake electors” from the 2020 election, there was no reason to search before 2023 because that prosecution hadn’t begun.

“The office was not entitled to disregard Judicial Watch’s unambiguous records request in favor of its own, narrower interpretation,” Sklar wrote.