Conover: LaWall’s attacks in Pima County Attorney race are distractions

Laura Conover is the Pima County Attorney, seeking election to her second term. This was originally published in the Tucson Sentinel.

I read Barbara LaWall’s recent “unhinged” opinion piece with amusement and will respond briefly:

When I was a candidate four years ago, we will all recall that her chief deputy filed the first-ever bar complaint against me (dismissed!) over a campaign move. Though state bar organizations have sadly been weaponized across the country since then, it was considered at the time a novel and brazen move to try to get an opponent off the ballot by taking away the candidate’s license to earn a living.

But I had dared to challenge their chosen predecessor, and they used such ugly tactics. In addition, almost every one of her senior staff and Barbara herself actively campaigned and endorsed my opponent. And so, to suggest that two months after that, from August 2020 to October 2020, the former administration all turned around to really, *really* help me after I won the primary election is both laughable and provably wrong.

1. I wrote a letter to every employee in the Pima County Attorney’s Office after winning in August. The former administration sat on it for weeks and weeks despite my repeated requests to send it out, sowing uncertainty and fear among the employees about my “silence.” (There’s proof in writing!)

2. The former administration wouldn’t let me in the building, citing “COVID,” although all the employees were in there holding down the fort, masked up and stuck with paper files. TPD loaned me their downtown station, and every single supervisor had to walk up Stone Avenue in October 2020 to meet with me. There were 28 witnesses who came to see me, as well as the entire TPD command staff. (Proof in writing!).

3. Perhaps sensing that was “bad optics,” they allowed a one-hour tour of the building in December. A one-hour tour does not a transition make. (Proof in writing!)

4. And last but not least, it was only on day four of my brand-new administration in January 2021, at the height of COVID and pre-vaccine, buried under a nationwide violent crime spike, that former Criminal Chief David Berkman began his public records campaign to bury me, by requesting every single policy move I had made in my first short week in office. He’s now logged over 500 separate inquiries to our office. (Proof in writing!)

If you’re asking yourself what the absurdity of LaWall writing this “unhinged” opinion is and Conover being forced to respond is, you are correct in your analysis.

It is ludicrous to think Southern Arizona should spend but a moment distracted by LaWall’s “newly found Democrat” she found to run for office against another sitting Democrat when we should not take our eyes for a second off of flipping the Legislature and defeating Trump from another presidency.

All LaWall can do is distract because she cannot beat us on the facts: crime rate down, salaries and modernization up, death penalty out, treating kids as kids in.

Because when we look at the facts, LaWall has to take on the sitting reproductive health warrior and the restorative justice champion. We simply don’t look like, sound like, nor behave like the former administration in the new People’s Office, and that is clearly a bit “unhinging.”