Today, both men have every reason to pretend that the events of last December never really happened — and, even if they did, they weren't that awful.
Do not be fooled. These things did happen, they were that awful, and county taxpayers will be paying the price for a very long time.
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Last year, drunk on the conspiracy theory that all county officials were corrupt and that county judges were shielding them, Arpaio and Thomas went nuts. They charged Supervisors Don Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox with cases so weak that a wiser prosecutor is on the record saying that she saw no evidence of a crime. They executed a grossly overreaching search warrant on developer Conley Wolfswinkel, rifling through his offices for 11 hours as television cameras recorded the event.
They tarred everybody — Stapley, Wilcox, county administrators, and county judges — with an "ineptly drafted rant" (to quote Michael Manning), purporting to be a racketeering lawsuit.
Most famously, they charged Donahoe with bribery, even though, they admit, he never took anything of value from anyone.
Now that Arpaio and Thomas' cases have been revealed as complete fabrication, all their targets are suing. In the past two months, Stapley, Wilcox, Wolfswinkel, Donahoe, and two superior court judges have filed notices of claim against the county.
You only have to read these notices of claim to realize that the injuries are real. Stapley's spent $1 million on lawyers. Wilcox has seen business drop at her restaurant, she's had loan applications denied, and at least one major award she was set to receive for public service has been rescinded. Wolfswinkel has suffered serious business setbacks; his attorney, Grant Woods, notes that the law provides treble damages for every deal Wolfswinkel lost thanks to the sheriff's slander.
None of them has anything on Donahoe.
When Thomas and Arpaio first announced criminal charges against the county's presiding judge, we all imagined they must have something: some witness who'd seen a cash-stuffed envelope, some evidence of a deal being cut.
Wrong.
They had nothing but their own nutty delusions, their insistence that the only reason someone would rule against them is if he'd been paid off.
After Thomas left the County Attorney's Office, New Times' Ray Stern asked his longtime flack, Barnett Lotstein, whether Thomas had more evidence in his case against Donahoe.
Lotstein sniffed that Thomas doesn't try cases in the media. It was the most disingenuous thing that's ever come out of Lotstein's perpetually disingenuous mouth.
When it came to defendants like Stapley, Wilcox, and Donahoe, Thomas only tried cases in the media. The point of the exercise wasn't to win convictions in court — God knows Thomas never managed to do that. The point was the press conference: the suggestion that they had a case, that these people were corrupt.
They couldn't prove it, of course. But they could make us wonder.
Three years ago, Arpaio and Thomas held a press conference to announce that they were investigating Attorney General Terry Goddard, questioning whether Goddard went lightly on a criminal defendant in exchange for a payment to his office's civil division.
No one ever alleged that Goddard personally profited one dime from the decision. No one has ever shown that Goddard was even personally involved.
But they could plant the seed. They could make us wonder.
Last week, Thomas finally admitted in an interview with the Arizona Republic's Michael Kiefer what reasonable people have known for years: They never had anything on Goddard. "I did not think it would be fair and appropriate for a cloud to be hanging over him, when to my knowledge there is no evidence implicating him," Kiefer quoted Thomas as saying.
Thomas, for once, is right: It would not be "fair" and "appropriate" for a cloud to be hanging over Goddard. But it's kind of ironic that Thomas feels that way today considering just how hard he and Arpaio worked to seed the cloud in question.
Barnett Lotstein can claim that they don't try their cases in the media. Ha ha ha. In Goddard's case, Arpaio and Thomas didn't just hold a press conference to announce they were investigating him. They actually gave reporters a recording of the key piece of evidence.
Then they kept the investigation "open" for three years. Three! Arpaio issued at least two press releases accusing Goddard of stonewalling —and held a press conference repeating the claim. Meanwhile, the pair subpoenaed more than 12 million pages of records. Goddard's lawyers managed to get that reduced to 70,000 or so, but still.
And now Thomas tells us there was no evidence implicating Goddard? How fair and appropriate of him.
Clearly, the investigation into Goddard was never really about getting to the bottom of what happened at the Attorney General's Office. It was about intimidating Goddard.
Likewise, the prosecution of Donahoe was never about Donahoe's accepting a bribe. (Since, of course, he didn't.) It was about intimidating Donahoe. Hence the press conference, the Social Security number leak, the angry process server.
The goal wasn't to get at the truth. The goal was to torture the judge who dared oppose Thomas and Arpaio — and scare others into submission, too.
