PHOENIX — The Arizona Legislature will exempt itself from state public records law and destroy all email correspondence sent or received by lawmakers or staff after 90 days under new rules adopted by majority Republicans over vigorous opposition from minority Democrats.
The Senate also completely exempted text messages on their personal phones, which lawmakers frequently use for legislative business, from release at any time. The House policy is not as expansive.
If in place after the 2020 presidential election, these rules would have prevented the public from learning about many of the efforts to persuade Arizona lawmakers to throw out President Joe Biden’s win.
One of the most well-known of those efforts was a series of emails that Virginia Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a supporter of former President Donald Trump, sent to a host of state Republican House and Senate members just days after President Joe Biden won the election. She urged members to throw out Biden’s delegates to the Electoral College and replace them with a GOP slate. <snip>
