Mayes investigating Maricopa County Attorney’s No. 1 internet troll

Kris Mayes and Rachel Mitchell aren’t exactly pals.

Last year, they traded barbed letters over who has the authority to seek death warrants for state executions. Mitchell, the centrist Republican prosecutor for Maricopa County, accused Mayes of not killing prisoners fast enough. Mayes, the Democratic state attorney general, essentially told Mitchell to stay in her lane.

But when it comes to policing the social media output of a particularly cranky critic of Mitchell’s, it would appear they’re happy to play nice.

In the last few weeks, Mayes has injected her office into a bitter online feud between former Phoenix attorney Vladimir Gagic and Mitchell’s fiancé, Paul Stout. Gagic and Stout had waged a keyboard war for months on the social media site X, with Gagic blasting Mitchell and Stout counterattacking to defend her, albeit under two burner accounts. The feud resulted in Gagic being hit with a protective order limiting what he can tweet about Mitchell’s main squeeze.

The attorney general is now investigating whether Gagic violated that order, which technically expired in August. Mayes spokesperson Richie Taylor told Phoenix New Times that the warrant originated from Mayes’ office, which was sent the case by the Phoenix Police Department “because of the conflicts at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.”

New Times asked Mitchell’s office for a comment on the warrant, but has yet to receive a reply.

Given that the case involves dispeptic tweets, the information Mayes’ office seeks is particularly wide-ranging. State investigators obtained a broad warrant that they sent to the social media site X, seeking a motherlode of data on Gagic’s account @toxicvlad. X’s legal department emailed a copy of the warrant to Gagic on Nov. 6, and Gagic shared it with New Times. 

Signed by a judge on Oct. 30, it asks X for pretty much everything to do with Gagic’s account, including the times he logged in, his posts, all direct messages received and sent by him, a list of his 861 followers, all users who have liked or reposted his posts, “all location data associated with the account,” all data he deleted, a list of everyone he unfollowed or blocked and all X searches performed by him.

Asked about the breadth of the warrant and the possible First Amendment implications, Taylor pointed out that the order limiting Gagic’s online comments about Mitchell’s fiancé was upheld by the Arizona Court of Appeals. (Mitchell described Stout as her husband in one Phoenix police report, but has previously declined to comment on the couple’s status.)

“The Attorney General’s Office takes seriously allegations of harassment against family members of elected officials,” Taylor said.

According to the public record of the case, however, the “harassment” at issue would seem to barely fit the term. It involves no direct contact between Stout and Gagic, nor any real threat of violence. Mostly, it was a pissing match between two grown men.

Gagic on the brain 

New Times first reported on the internet melee between Stout and Gagic in 2024.

That year, Stout admitted on the stand during a hearing over the protective order that he used burner accounts on X, taking swipes at local journalists, politicians and Gina Godbehere, who challenged Mitchell in the Republican primary for county attorney. During his incognito run on X, Stout sniped at Gagic, who had criticized how Mitchell handled a sex trafficking case he’d worked as a defense attorney.

Gagic returned fire and then some, calling Stout out by his real name. Apparently easily spooked, Stout filed an injunction against harassment on Gagic in August 2024, which was served to Gagic at his home by three Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies and an FBI agent. The agent told Gagic the injunction had come from Mitchell’s office and that he could be charged with cyberstalking if he kept tweeting.

Gagic challenged the injunction in court, where Stout took the stand and admitted he used his X sock puppets, @AZJayPaul and @AZ1Patriot, to battle Gagic. Stout, who was represented by three lawyers from a firm that does business with the county, copped to being Mitchell’s fiancé and testified that Mitchell had helped draft his injunction petition. Gagic represented himself and questioned Stout, the only time the pair had ever actually spoken to each other.

Both men had flung insults at each other on X — Stout needling Gagic over a suspension from the State Bar of Arizona, and Gagic calling Stout a “psycho” and incorrectly suggesting that he might be a different Paul Stout convicted of a sex crime in Texas. Despite that, Maricopa County Commissioner Richard Albrecht upheld the injunction, ruling that it did not violate Gagic’s free speech rights.

Albrecht found that Gagic’s posts would cause a reasonable person “to be seriously alarmed, annoyed or harassed,” which is the rather subjective definition of “harassment” under Arizona law. Albrecht wrote that Gagic was allowed to “comment civilly” on Stout’s “ideas” but that Gagic could not post personal attacks that “do not convey a message of public interest or which contain lewd, profane or obscene remarks.”

Gagic appealed Albrecht’s ruling and continued to post about Stout and Mitchell, but his appeal was denied by the Arizona Court of Appeals in July. Gagic had argued that “Stout is acting as a proxy to his fiancé, the Maricopa County Attorney,” the court noted, but it ultimately found that the initial injunction was not “substantially motivated by a desire to deter, retaliate against or prevent the lawful exercise of a constitutional right.”

And yet, Stout’s own 2024 petition for the injunction notes that the entire row began when “Gagic began posting personal negative comments about my fiancée, the county attorney, on X.” Stout has since repeatedly complained to the Phoenix police about Gagic’s postings and even went so far as to call the cops when a New Times reporter phoned him to ask him for comment on the saga.

For her part, the county attorney seems preoccupied by Gagic. 

Though Gagic still cannot practice law as a result of a 2023 bar suspension, Mitchell asked for Gagic’s disbarment in 2024, citing nasty comments he made about Stout and the fact that “Gagic has been criticizing me for months on X.” And when someone anonymously sent Mitchell some alleged animal poop in the mail, Mitchell called the cops and suggested two possible suspects: Gagic and pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Arizona State University.

Big Sis?

No doubt many of Gagic’s posts are obnoxious, inaccurate and, in some cases, could be considered potentially defamatory. But an Orwellian warrant that could involve anyone who “liked” one of Gagic’s posts seems like overkill.

Veteran Phoenix defense attorney Jack Litwak, who has handled injunctions against harassment out the proverbial wazoo, pointed out that even if Gagic did commit a crime, it’s likely a low-level offense that a state attorney general usually doesn’t bother with. He said violating an injunction against harassment could be charged as “interfering with judicial proceedings,” a class 1 misdemeanor punishable by up to 6 months in jail. Another possibility could be the use of an electronic communication device to “terrify, intimidate, threaten or harass,” also a class 1 misdemeanor. 

Notably, in Gagic’s case, the only thing close to a threat was when Gagic challenged an X account — that Stout said didn’t even belong to him — to meet up somewhere for fisticuffs.

Asked if he thought the Attorney General’s office would bother itself with a misdemeanor charge, Litwak was unsure. “I don’t typically see that without a felony charge,” he said, “but they will charge misdemeanors associated with felonies.”

Gagic said he was alarmed by the warrant. Its attempt to track his direct messages on X reminded him of communist Yugoslavia, which his parents fled in the 1970s before bringing him to the United States when he was 5.

“Why does the county’s chief prosecutor, the FBI and the attorney general who’s suing Trump give a shit about my Twitter account?” the former Marine wondered. He added: “And if I’m really that bad, if I’m really harassing this asshole, how come Twitter hasn’t done anything?” 

Gagic denied that he’d ever threatened Stout, saying, “I’m not stupid. I’m not making a threat against anybody.” Regardless, he seemed convinced that Mayes intends to imprison him over his X account, despite the fact that the original injunction against him expired in August.

“They’ve already decided what they’re going to do,” he said. “They’re going to put me in jail, and there’s nothing I can do to fight it. It’s predetermined.”

One possible solution would be to err on the side of caution and stop tweeting. But Gagic said he’s continued to mention Stout and Mitchell online as a kind of “insurance policy.”

“They know that if they do something to me,” he said, “I’m going to do my goddamn best to put it out there.”