Mark Brnovich, the former Arizona attorney general who faced misconduct accusations over his handling of a 2020 election probe, is joining Boies Schiller & Flexner as a partner at the litigation firm.
Brnovich, a Republican, will join the David Boies-founded firm as a partner in Los Angeles, Boies Schiller said Wednesday. He will also maintain a presence in Arizona.
Brnovich, who served as Arizona’s top lawyer for eight years, said an extensive investigation into the 2020 presidential election discovered “serious vulnerabilities” in battleground Maricopa County after Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the state. His successor, Democrat Kris Mayes, released documents in February showing that Brnovich kept private an earlier investigative report finding no support for allegations of fraud at the ballot box.
Boies Schiller, which touted the hire of Brnovich and two others in a Wednesday statement, did not immediately make Brnovich and firm managing partner Matthew Schwartz available for comment about the move. Brnovich in a statement said joining the firm marks “a natural career evolution for me given its sterling track record across white collar, constitutional law, regulatory, class action, and consumer matters.”
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, in February asked the state’s bar to review Brnovich’s conduct related to the investigation. Documents uncovered by Mayes show that Brnovich disregarded certain edits from his investigators about the findings of the probe.
The state bar did not respond to a request for comment on the status of any review.
Brnovich told the Washington Post in February that Hobbs was trying to “defame and cancel a political opponent.” He told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in October 2022 that the claims of election fraud were “horseshit.”
“I’ve been trying to scrape it off my shoes for the last year,” he said in the CBS interview.
He leaves behind politics after a failed US Senate bid. He lost in the Republican primary to Trump-backed candidate Blake Masters, who was later ousted in the general election.
During his tenure as Arizona’s top law enforcement official, Brnovich secured more than $1.5 billion in judgments and settlements in consumer protection litigation, according to Boies. He is perhaps most well-known for his work on a Supreme Court dispute where the conservative majority rejected challenges to two newly enacted Arizona laws on voting procedures, a decision that further limited the reach of the Voting Rights Act.
He joins Boies Schiller along with Joshua Stein, a former in-house counsel at Twitter based in San Francisco, and Benjamin Waisbren, a Washington, DC-based bankruptcy and restructuring specialist, who will also be members of the firm’s partnership.
Source: Bloomberg Law News
